According to New Silkroad Discovery article published on February 23, 2023, less than a year after its founding, Tailwind Shipping Lines, a subsidiary of Lidl International, is launching a new liner service that will particularly focus on transporting textile goods from Bangladesh to Europe. It will be called the Tiger Express service (or “TEX service”, for short) after the Bengal tiger, the national animal of Bangladesh. The service will offer a high degree of reliability as well as a fast transit time of fewer than 20 days between Chittagong and Barcelona. For European retailers, this means that goods will arrive on their store shelves on time even in periods of often overburdened supply chains.
Tailwind Shipping Lines offers a cost-effective alternative to air freight for Lidl goods as well as for customers from the fashion and textile sectors. The new, attractive offer is thus also aimed at third-party customers. “Owing to the ships we deploy, we can reach the region without any intermediate stops or transshipment,” says Wolf Tiedemann, the board member of Lidl Stiftung & Co. KG responsible for logistics as well as the Managing Director of Tailwind Shipping Lines GmbH & Co. KG. “Especially thanks to the direct connection between Bangladesh and Europe, this will represent a huge increase in efficiency, which we will also use to boost the reliability of the supply chains for our customers.” This kind of smaller service also fosters greater proximity to customers and the ability to quickly meet their requirements.
Another big advantage will be the smaller ports that Tailwind’s Tiger Express service will call at. In both Barcelona and the Dutch port town of Moerdijk, it will be possible to load the goods onto trucks in a comparatively short time and transport them directly to their specific destinations.
Already last year, the Tailwind team successfully launched the Panda Express service, which operates between China and Europe. It sails on a route from Taicang via Ningbo and Shenzhen to Koper, Barcelona and Rotterdam.
