VIA GRAPHIC PLUS — When a shipment shows up late, the effect compounds beyond the dock.. A customer who was promised delivery today gets a phone call instead. The late arrival at the port becomes a scramble everywhere after it.
That scramble is happening more often. A September report from logistics firm Kuehne+Nagel put the wait for ships to dock at Manila’s main ports at about 2.7 days, with the terminals running near full for much of the year. The country is moving more cargo than ever, and those gateways have little room to absorb a bad week. Plenty of operations managers already turn to Lalamove when that happens. Most people know it for motorcycle deliveries, but its fleet includes vehicles up to 12-ton trucks, which larger enterprises increasingly rely on for flexible, on-demand logistics support.
“The real pain point for most businesses is not the price of the delivery itself. It is everything a late shipment sets off around it, the goods sitting idle, the staff waiting on them, and the sales lost when stock arrives a day too late,” said Djon Nacario, Managing Director of Lalamove Philippines, who earlier worked in supply chain management at Unilever.
Here is the shift more Philippine companies are making. When you cannot count on cargo arriving on time, you cannot lock all your delivery capacity into trucks you bought months ago and have to keep busy. So instead of owning enough vehicles for their heaviest day, more businesses are keeping their fleets lean and hiring extra delivery capacity only when they need it. The flexibility itself becomes the advantage. On Lalamove, a company pays for that extra capacity by the trip and can watch each one live on a map. Every business delivery is also insured, and high-value loads can be protected for up to 8 million pesos.
Why a bigger fleet stopped paying off
The old answer to unpredictable demand was to own for the peak–buy enough trucks for the busiest week and keep them ready.
A truck that sits in the yard still costs money. The loan, the insurance, the upkeep, the driver’s salary–none of that stops just because the truck isn’t moving. The other option is to keep a smaller fleet, but then the busy days catch you short, and you’re calling around to hire trucks at whatever price you can get.
A middle ground exists, and more companies are using it. They keep their own fleet small and call in extra trucks from Lalamove only for the days they actually need them.
One account, motorcycle to 12-ton truck
Everything runs off one account. A company can book a motorcycle for a quick document run in the morning, then a 10-wheeler that carries up to 12 tons in the afternoon, with vans and smaller trucks for whatever falls in between. You pick the vehicle that fits the load in front of you, not the one you bought years ago. A factory hauling raw materials, a shop restocking its branches, a distributor sending out one big order- all of them can work from the same platform.
Fleet options are only part of the complete solution. Integrating directly with existing inventory and order management systems, the platform automatically triggers delivery dispatch as soon as an order is placed. It also offers seamless connectivity to e-commerce storefronts like WooCommerce and Shopify. Operations, purchasing, and finance share one account featuring live tracking, a unified wallet, and monthly billing. As a result, urgent bookings integrate seamlessly alongside scheduled deliveries.
Who covers the damage
Even before speed, a business’s main shipment concern is damage risk, like critical machinery, morning medical supplies, or urgent auto parts.
With Lalamove, every business delivery comes with cover up to 75,000 pesos through Pioneer Insurance, subject to the policy terms. When the load is worth more, its Goods Protection Promises program can cover up to 8 million pesos for a single booking.
“For most businesses, the more important question is not how fast the delivery moves. It is what happens if the goods are damaged along the way, who covers it, and how quickly. We made protection a standard part of every business delivery so that answer is ready before the customer has to ask,” Nacario said.
None of this replaces a company’s own trucks or its usual hauler. If the volume is steady and the route is the same every day, owning or contracting that capacity is still the cheaper way to run it.
Lalamove operates nationwide across the Philippines, providing reliable reach from major metropolitan hubs to regional corridors. It handles what nobody can plan for: the order that changed this morning, the route you have never run before and the load that turns out too big for the truck sitting in your yard. As ports stay busy, and deliveries are getting harder to time, that unplanned part of the job keeps expanding, and it is the last part a company wants to leave to luck.
Started in 1927, the Philippines Graphic is the longest-running printed magazine of national circulation that provides relevant news and features and promotes Philippine literature.
