The logistics industry is a burgeoning sector. With the realization of industrialization and fierce market competition, corporate organizational structures are continuously adjusting and evolving. Capital and production capacity are gradually concentrating in diversified large companies, leading to increasingly larger enterprise sizes. Beyond a certain scale, economic inefficiencies known as organizational failure phenomena emerge. Large enterprises have also undergone adjustments, with massive investments and outputs, resulting in an ever-growing and complex logistics scale within the company. Traditional, decentralized logistics activities are no longer sufficient to meet the demands of modern economic development. The inefficiency of logistics activities and high costs have become constraints on economic operation efficiency and the smooth progress of social reproduction. They also contribute to a decrease in market competitiveness. Some companies have begun to integrate various logistics functions and elements, reconfigure resources, and gradually form logistics systems and industries.
Firstly, the internal logistics resources of the company were integrated into an integrated system, centered around the enterprise, which led to logistics management becoming an independent department and functional area within the company. Subsequently, the integration of logistics resources was no longer limited to the enterprise level but expanded to the entire supply chain, which includes interconnected and collaborative entities. This resulted in a socialized logistics system centered on supply chain management. Logistics activities gradually evolved from the production, transaction, and consumption processes, becoming a specialized new economic activity carried out by independent economic organizations. This also gave rise to a new industry, known as the logistics industry. Consequently, in developed economies, companies that provide specialized logistics services to businesses and consumers emerged, commonly referred to as "third-party logistics."
In today's economy, the logistics industry and the logistics services it offers have fundamentally differentiated from traditional logistics activities or those carried out by production and distribution departments.
① Unlike logistics activities, the logistics industry has separated and re-optimized various logistics resources scattered across different enterprises and departments. It has differentiated supply chain, warehousing, distribution, and delivery activities from production and circulation, creating a systematic and professional logistics industry. In this sense, due to the objective needs of social and economic development, a new logistics industry has emerged.
The emergence of the logistics industry has reorganized social logistics resources and activities, maximizing the utilization of logistics facilities, enhancing efficiency in logistics operations, and reducing the overall social logistics cost. This has significantly lowered circulation costs for production and distribution sectors, expanding their profit margins. A key role of the logistics industry is to greatly conserve social logistics resources while providing services to production and distribution sectors, allowing them to achieve higher profits with a certain level of resource investment. Furthermore, the logistics industry offers a more comprehensive and diverse range of logistics services to the entire society. Not only can these services provide tangible services such as transportation, distribution, and processing, but they also offer intangible services like logistics solution design and information management, which are difficult for traditional circulation departments like commercial enterprises, transportation companies, and warehousing companies to match. Consequently, the logistics industry is hailed as the "third source of profit," as it reduces costs and expands the profit space for its service recipients.
In today's modern economy, with the deepening of social division of labor and the increasing complexity of economic structures, the interchanges and interdependencies among various industries, sectors, and enterprises have become increasingly intricate. The logistics industry serves as the纽带 and the bloodstream that sustains these complex exchanges, connecting all parts of the social economy and integrating them into a cohesive whole. Consequently, the logistics industry is an indispensable and crucial component of economic operations. Its role in society is also significant. As a new industry, logistics has a history of just over two decades. Since the 1980s, with the continuous development of economic globalization, the advancement of scientific and technological levels, and the further deepening of specialized division of labor, the United States and some other developed countries in Europe have initiated a "logistics revolution," integrating various functions and elements of logistics. This has led to logistics activities becoming systematized and professionalized, and being taken on by new economic entities—specifically, "third-party logistics" companies dedicated to providing logistics services. By the 1990s, numerous specialized logistics service companies emerged in abundance in the developed countries of Europe and America, demonstrating rapid growth trends, thus forming the logistics industry and becoming an important part of the service sector in developed countries.
