Take your seats please

This year’s Handball World Championship in Qatar may have been controversial but there were no complaints about the seating, which reached the Gulf state thanks to a coordinated team effort by freight forwarder Logwin.
In fact, the seats were quite a noticeable feature of the tournament, because so many of them remained empty.
And while one of the shocks of the tournament was the host team reaching the final, there were no surprises with the logistics of moving 15,300 seats and around 100 tables to the sports hall in Lusail near Doha.
The project team shipped a total of 30 tonnes by air from China and Malaysia, with Logwin also organising the transport from the factory to the airports in China and Malaysia.
National sales manager at Logwin in Malaysia, Christian Goedden, explained: "The total volume was huge, which is why we split the goods up into eight air freight shipments. That made it easier to book the freight space as well as to arrange the onward transportation from Doha." An average of around 2,000 seats went on board each flight.
With time running out before the opening ceremony, Logwin first negotiated the best possible air freight allocations with the airlines and then informed the customer about the flight plans. "This enabled the company to produce the seats, tables, armrests and podiums just-in-time – directly from production to truck," says Christian Goedden.
Additional component parts such as seat cushions and armrests had to arrive simultaneously from Malaysia and China, synchronised by Logwin staff in Kuala Lumpur and Beijing who kept in close contact with the manufacturer on a daily basis.
"Our customer knew exactly when which shipment would arrive at Doha Airport. Using these precise details it was able to schedule workers appropriately to set up the sports hall in Lusail," explains Christian Goedden.
The hall was ready for use in time for the opening ceremony and the subsequent opening game between Qatar and Brazil.
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