SO’s fleet of fluorescent green trucks stand out like a beacon and the firm’s profile at New Zealand log export ports is equally prominent.

Trucking is one of many cogs in the machine of ISO’s operations in New Zealand, which handles around 60 per cent of New Zealand’s export log trade. It loads over 500 log vessels a year, around 11 vessels a week. While logs — more than 25 million of them a year — feature prominently, ISO also handles a large portion of New Zealand’s kiwifruit exports, around 25% of the country’s pulp exports as well as container, breakbulk and all manner of other import and export operations.

ISO was founded in 1995 as a stevedoring company, which fundamentally is the process of loading or unloading ships. Since then, the company has diversified into other businesses where it has seen opportunities to add value for customers. More often though, it needed to ramp up efficiency in these other operations to keep up with its ability to load ships. It is now a multi-faceted logistics company focused on port operations.

In the good old days loading ships was done with a lot of labour. Crated goods were loaded into cargo nets which the ships’ cranes then hauled aboard. Stevedores then manually stacked them in the hold.

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