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TAPA EMEA IIS DATA
OVER 6,400 INCIDENTS AND €172 MILLION OF PRODUCTS STOLEN FROM SUPPLY CHAINS IN EMEA IN 2020
Thorsten Neumann, TAPA EMEA
Product thefts from supply chains in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) in 2020 produced losses of more than €172 million despite most of the region being in lockdown as nations took drastic steps to prevent the spread of coronavirus, according to the Transported Asset Protection Association’s (TAPA) Cargo Theft Annual Report.
Based only on data reported to the Association’s Incident Information Service (IIS), in a year when governments were advising their populations to ‘stay at home and work from home’, TAPA EMEA still recorded 6,463 new cargo thefts across a record number of 56 countries in the region, and an average loss for every day of 2020 of €471,432.
The average loss for major cargo crimes with individual losses of €100,000 or more in 2020 was €529,348.
The high numbers, however, remain only a fraction of the losses TAPA EMEA believes are being suffered by Manufacturers/Shippers and Logistics Service Providers in EMEA. The total loss for 2020 is based on only the 65.1% of reports to TAPA EMEA’s IIS which shared financial data. Moreover, the world’s leading supply chain security and resilience Association says most cargo thefts during road, ocean, airfreight and rail transportation
are still not reported by victims to its incident database.
In 2020, 74.6% of all incidents recorded by TAPA EMEA involved cargo thefts in the United Kingdom and Germany, with 3,100 and 1,727 crimes respectively over the 12-month period. In both cases, the statistics – while reinforcing both countries’ reputations as cargo crime hotspots in EMEA – more accurately reflect the proactive sharing of cargo crime data by British and German Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs). Six other countries recorded triple-digit incident rates:
• Russia – 307 incidents • Netherlands – 199 • Spain – 178 • Italy – 121 • South Africa 105 • Denmark – 101
“2020 will go down in history as a year like no other. At a time when most businesses were focused almost entirely on a fight for survival, and law enforcement agencies faced the added pressure of policing new government lockdowns, traditional channels of cargo crime data were, as expected, also severely impacted. Consequently, it is difficult to give a meaningful comparison with previous years. However, while some criminal operations would have been disrupted by lockdown measures, 2020 still saw the second-highest rate of incidents in TAPA’s 24-year history, and, had we been able to maintain the same level of data sharing from LEAs across the region as we achieved in 2019, I am certain 2020 would have set a new record for cargo crimes in the EMEA region,” stated Thorsten Neumann, President & CEO of TAPA EMEA. “For Organised Crime Groups (OCGs) and other, smaller groups of offenders targeting supply chains, cargo crime is its own ‘industry’ offering very rich rewards. Although, TAPA EMEA members are among those companies best protected from these threats, the risks remain 24/7/365, even during a pandemic.”
Plenty of factors will have fuelled criminal activities in 2020, including widespread and, often, misleading media reports of product shortages and empty supermarket shelves. Job losses or the fear of unemployment will have opened up new ‘markets’ to buyers seeking bargains, and then there was the global race for scarce supplies of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) from governments, medical professionals and consumers. With demand exceeding supply, many cargo thieves clearly
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