The logistics outsourcing 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 increasingly concentrating in diversified large companies, resulting in larger and larger scales of enterprises. Beyond a certain scale, economic inefficiencies, also known as organizational failure, arise. Large enterprises have also undergone adjustments, with massive investments and outputs leading to increasingly large and complex logistics operations within the company. Traditional, decentralized logistics activities are no longer sufficient to meet the demands of modern economic development. The inefficiency of logistics operations and high costs have become constraints on the efficiency of economic operations and the smooth progress of social reproduction. They also contribute to the weakening of 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, making logistics management an independent department and functional area within the company. Subsequently, the integration and unification of logistics resources were no longer limited to the enterprise level but shifted to the entire supply chain, which includes interconnected and collaborative sectors. This resulted in a socialized logistics system centered on supply chain management. Logistics activities gradually became differentiated from the production, transaction, and consumption processes, evolving into a new type of economic activity—specialized and carried out by independent economic organizations. This also gave rise to a new industry: the logistics industry. On this basis, in developed economies, enterprises providing specialized logistics services to businesses and consumers emerged, known as "third-party logistics."
In today's modern economy, the logistics industry and the logistics services it provides have fundamentally区别ed from traditional logistics activities or those carried out by production and distribution departments.
① Unlike logistics activities, the logistics industry has separated various logistics resources scattered across different enterprises and departments, reoptimized and recombined them, and rationally allocated them. It has differentiated logistics activities such as supply, warehousing, distribution, and delivery from the production and circulation sectors, forming 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 the efficiency of logistics operations, and reducing the overall social logistics cost. This has significantly lowered circulation expenses for production and distribution sectors, expanding their profit margins. A crucial role of the logistics industry is to provide services to production and distribution sectors while conserving social logistics resources, allowing them to achieve higher profits with a certain level of resource investment. Additionally, the logistics industry offers a more diverse range of services to the entire society, not only tangible services like transportation, distribution, and processing, but also intangible services such as logistics scheme design and information management, which are difficult for traditional circulation sectors like commercial, transportation, and warehousing enterprises to match. Therefore, the logistics industry is hailed as the "third source of profit," as it reduces costs and expands the profit margins for service recipients.
In today's modern economy, as social division of labor deepens and economic structures become increasingly complex, the interexchange relationships and interdependence among various industries, sectors, and enterprises have become increasingly intricate. The logistics industry serves as the纽带 and bloodstream that binds these complex exchanges, connecting all parts of the social economy and integrating them into a cohesive whole. Therefore, the logistics industry is an indispensable and crucial component of economic operations. Its role in society is also significant. The logistics industry is a new one, with only a history of 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, a "logistics revolution" began in some developed countries in the U.S. and Europe, integrating various functions and elements of logistics. As a result, logistics activities started to become systematized and professionalized, and emerged as a new economic activity carried out by independent economic organizations. The "third-party logistics" enterprises, specializing in logistics services, began to emerge. By the 1990s, numerous specialized logistics service enterprises surged in the developed countries of North America and Europe, showing a rapid development trend, thus forming the logistics industry and becoming an important part of the service sector in developed countries.
