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This article was first published in the April 2016 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online. For more stories from WIRED's China issue, click here.
It's tough making a living as a truck driver in China. "The brokers list their cargo on blackboards, the freelance drivers decide what they want to carry, and on average it takes three to five days to find the right load," explains Rui Song in Beijing. "Forty per cent of trucks drive empty on their return routes, wasting money on fuel and tolls. And they don't make much, so they often overload their trucks on the way out, which can be dangerous."
All that changed in 2015, when smartphone use reached critical mass among truck drivers. They could use Song's new app, Loji, to view delivery opportunities - and to sort out a return journey. By February 2016, around three million drivers were on the app, and a million shippers had used it.
Song's company, the Eunke Technology Group, designed the app - nicknamed "Little Donkey" - to empower drivers using data. "We use big data to match their path to the right loads," he explains, "so we're increasing their chances of getting work, and cutting their waiting time for return loads. And businesses don't have to pay local drivers to travel both ways." Loji also tracks the drivers' movements every 15 minutes - for the first time giving them a detailed employment history, which lets them to build a credit rating to finance their truck purchase. "We're essentially a logistics business based on big data," Song explains. "Nobody had that data before. Nobody found the value in collecting it."
Song, 29, won an internship at Facebook while he was pursuing his PhD in industrial engineering at UC Berkeley. He was asked to build a logistics model to plan the locations of Facebook data centres. After less than a year at Facebook, he joined PwC Advisory as a big-data technician, but like many "sea turtles" - the local phrase for students who return to China after a foreign education - he found home calling. First, he joined an e-commerce company, Lightinthebox, where his tasks included building warehouses in Poland. But then he got to know Bob Xu at ZhenFund, an early-stage investment fund, who was keen to invest in the trucker platform that Song mentioned to him.
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It launched fast. The founders came up with idea in April 2014, launched it in August 2014 and used SEO to attract 300,000 users in a month. When WIRED meets Song in October 2015, he's hired 400 people, and Loji is growing at 200 per cent a month and heading to its 80th city. It takes no commission, but instead is using its scale to develop a truck repair business, a truck-sales business and financial services. "Our mission is to revamp the entire Chinese logistics industry," he says. "Social logistics accounts for 18 per cent of China's GDP, but less than eight per cent in the US. If we can cut the 18 per cent to eight per cent, we can save the country six trillion RMB a year."
Song has counted 200 other companies in China doing similar things, but he's not fazed. "We're trying to become the largest platform for shippers, no matter what they ship. If we can map the right carrier to the goods, think what that will mean for same-day delivery."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
