ROTTERDAM's RMI Global Logistic Services, after 13 years delivering chemicals and food in liquid tanks around the world, has chosen Singapore as its intra-Asian operations base.
"If you look at Asia, with the largest populations in the world, growing and growing, they have more and more money to spend. They are more able to buy luxury goods. And that includes expensive drinks," said RMI's Singapore spokesman Peter Scholten, whose big food business is food ingredients and drinks.
"And if you look at chemicals, there will be more and more consumption goods such as cars. There will be more products, which have the chemicals as base ingredients. That's a huge, growing market, too," Mr Scholten said.
After decades in Europe and more recently in America, RMI Food Logistics, which is ISO 9001:2000, HACCP and GMP certified, has become more focused on emerging markets.
"Brazil, also the rest of Latin America, is growing fast. Europe, is not growing that fast, not to that extent," he said.
Mr Scholten said RMI is a family-owned Dutch company, founded near Rotterdam. Thirteen years ago it purchased a branch office of a European tanker operator, a small one with only 40-50 tank containers used to move chemicals in Europe.
"Currently, we run a fleet in Europe of 800 'swap body tank containers'. Swap body tanks are larger than tanks in the deep-sea trade. They have the capacity up to 35,000 litres and can only be used in intermodal trade in Europe," he said.
After RMI started deep sea shipping, it mostly moved wine from the new producing nations such as Australia, Chile and South Africa to Europe, the US and Canada.
"To do that, we founded RMI Chicago for North America. After that, we developed a liquid food business from the United States - bourbon from Kentucky to Australia and South Africa. In food liquids in tanks, we are a market leader," he said.
As to the future, Mr Scholten sees RMI as a middling global player in the chemicals and a large one in food. "So in Europe, we intend to grow the intra-European food business. In the overseas business, we are growing in chemical to become middle size
"Although we are a small tank container operator, in deep sea, we want to grow the chemical business. That's why I founded the RMI Singapore. We want to grow the Asian market - intra-Asia," Mr Scholten said.
RMI chose Singapore because the tank container trade has been traditionally based here and well connected to the global industry hubs of Rotterdam and Houston - Rotterdam because of its European centrality, Houston because it is the base of America's petrochemical industry and Singapore because its centrality in Asia, its top-of-the-line infrastructure and that language is no problem.
"If you're in rush here, you want to quickly visit your agents, your clients in the region, everything's three, four hours' away. So the location is perfect," he said.