Cargofax merger?
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A CLEAR HINT that the Road Haulage Association wants to pull out of its involvement in its Cargofax load matching and information service came at last week's Tipcon conference in Harrogate. Membership services will be extended in another direction.
RHA director-general Freddie Plaskett revealed that talks are being held with Datafreight, the National Freight Consortium's rival service, and with other companies engaged in electronic information technology to see whether Cargofax can be merged into a single system for the road transport industry.
This move is in spite of renewed interest from international hauliers who found it useful when the French lorry drivers' blockade sealed off normal routes earlier this year.
But there are still only about 150 hauliers using the service, against an initial target of 250 set in 1983, but which Mr Plaskett conceded had been too optimistic. He said it made little sense for Cargofax to be competing with other systems and laid the blame for its failure to survive in its present form on "the failure of large numbers of our members to support our very lowcost Cargofax facility."
"We have not reached our break-even figure and we cannot go on subsidising the system as we have been doing. That is why we have concluded that there really is only room for one system," he told delegates at Tipcon.
Cargofax losses were the main reason why membership services generated £2,040 less profit last year than in 1982 (CM, May 5).
It was possible, Mr Plaskett admitted, that a merged system would need to charge operators more for information, but promised that the RHA would do its best to obtain either a discount for Cargofax users or some exclusive information for RHA members.
While Cargofax's future within the RHA looks like ending if negotiations succeed, the Bain Dawes partnership in RHA Insurance Services, the company providing exclusive insurance arrangements for association members, has been so successful that a similar service is being launched to provide finance.
A new company, RHA Finance Services, has been formed in partnership with a national finance group which, for the present, is not being named by the RHA.
It will start trading from the end of this month, and will provide a wide range of competitively-priced finance deals from over 100 branches in Britain.