Robot logistics unicorn Geek+ owes its growth to innovative digital banking services with a seamless global network
- Smart logistics company Geek+ has dominated the global market share in the autonomous mobile robot industry for four consecutive years
- As it continues to expand across 30 countries and counting, fast and easy-to-use digital banking solutions play a key role in its rapid growth
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Amid skyrocketing e-commerce demands, labour shortages and rising costs around the world, automated logistics company Geek+ has risen to the top.
Founded in 2015, the tech unicorn specialises in smart warehouse solutions using autonomous mobile robots (AMR) to pick, sort and move goods. It has dominated the global AMR market share for the last four years. The company has a presence in more than 30 countries, working with a range of clients.
There have been drastic changes in the market in recent years, caused by factors such as the global pandemic and shifts in online shopping habits. These have led more companies to consider investing in automation equipment to cope with the shortage of manpower, the rapid increase in order volume and the logistics requirements of next-day or same-day delivery. That is according to Lit Fung, vice-president and managing director of international business for Geek+.
According to Fung, 80 per cent of warehouses in the world are not yet equipped with automation – and that means there is huge potential for smart logistics. “These are difficult problems that can be best solved using Geek+’s AMR technologies,” he says.
To cope with its exponential growth and this ever-growing demand in recent years, the company says having reliable cross-border digital banking support proved to be crucial.
Access to overseas markets
With the aim of expanding across the Greater Bay Area and beyond, Geek+ set up its Asia-Pacific headquarters in Hong Kong in 2017, enlisting HSBC Commercial Banking as its banking partner.
Fung says during the early stage of growth, Hong Kong was “a good springboard to enter the global market”, as the logistics industry had long been an important economic pillar of the city, with many tax and trade benefits.
The company chose HSBC as it favoured the bank’s history of more than 155 years in Hong Kong, its vast global network and international experience spanning more than 60 countries and territories, and its innovative digital banking solutions that seamlessly connected Geek+ to the rest of the world.
Coping with cross-border expansion
Fung says Geek+ was particularly drawn to what he describes as HSBC Commercial Banking’s “tailor-made solutions to meet global business needs”, a quality he says his company also shares. “Like HSBC, we focus on providing customers with instant solutions that meet market needs, and will continue to develop new products to meet the various needs of customers.
“It was this willingness to embrace challenges that allowed us to accumulate experience and develop brand-new solutions to meet customer requirements,” he says, adding it enabled the company to be successful in more than 30 countries.
In just a few years, Geek+ grew from having a few employees to being a fully fledged global team with almost 2,000 staff. The company needed a bank with innovative, flexible digital banking services that could help it make and collect payments in different currencies seamlessly and instantaneously. To that end, Fung was particularly impressed with HSBCnet, a single banking platform that could take care of all the company’s finances and monitor all its international HSBC accounts in one place.
An agile partner for growth
As AMR technology continues to thrive, Geek+ has invested effort and resources into ensuring it remains at the forefront of the sector. In 2021, Geek+ established its Global Research and Development (R&D) Centre at Hong Kong Science Park, showing its faith in the city as a hub for international connectivity. “Setting up an R&D centre here made it easier to understand the needs of customers in different regions, improve products and tailor solutions to meet the needs of overseas customers,” says Fung.
“From here, we will focus on improving and optimising our products, and continue to cooperate with different enterprises across different fields to establish a better AMR ecosystem to make AMR technology more accessible and popular.”
As Geek+ continues to grow on, having an agile banking partner is paramount. “With HSBC as our partner, the sky’s the limit,” Fung says.
The rapid growth of Geek+ is an example of the success stories HSBC is striving to support on a global scale. “HSBC will continue to act as a super-connector in the business community,” says Frank Fang, general manager, head of commercial banking at HSBC Hong Kong and Macau. “Our market-leading digital banking solutions enable businesses and start-ups, which are becoming increasingly tech-savvy and reliant on mobile technology, to operate and manage their finances more seamlessly and efficiently. Greater convenience and less hassle mean they can focus on pursuing growth opportunities both locally and internationally.”