Analysis of the provision of logistic services

The logistic services market is defined as the sum of services with increasing value added that enable the connection of a chain of producers with their intermediate and final clients under the best cost and reliability conditions.

The study "La Infraestructura en el Desarrollo Integral de América Latina. Fortalecer las capacidades logísticas y competir exitosamente en los mercados mundiales de servicios logísticos: imperativos y oportunidades para América Latina" (Infrastructure in the Comprehensive Development of Latin America. Strengthening Logistic Capacities and Successfully Competing in the Logistic Services World Market: Imperatives and Opportunities for Latin America) (CAF 2013) analyzes the region's strategic dynamics through the segmentation of the provision of logistic services, which is organized in four levels with increasing value added:

• Transportation operators: starting at the lowest level are the individual transportation service operators, storage, and administrative services.
• These transportation operators complement with companies that specialize in the higher value added stages: provision of comprehensive management services on the one hand, or of the full logistic chain of a company (which continues to integrate the chain through its internal logistic role).
• Full sub-contracting of the chain's management to a specialized company, on the basis of a service provision contract (the so called 3PL, or third party logistics providers).
• An emerging provision, which consists of assisting/carrying out the logistic and manufacturing/provision strategy for a company, and its full management (the so called 4PL).
• In some cases, new players arise that "create" new chains: the network coordinators (as are the representative cases of Olam and  Li & Fung).