International Freight Forwarder Acts As A Third-party Logistics Operators A Number Of Legal Issues

This is the society that has entered a prosperous time of intern -ational logistics. The international forwarding agents (IFA for short) have been fully aware of the increasingly fierce competition in the freight market. However, logistics can provide a new opportunity for further development .On the basis of the traditionally engaged forwarding services, the international forwarding agents will act as the third party logistic operators (TPLO for short ) by setting foot on the logistics business .Once IFA become TPLO, the scope of business will be further broadened into such fields as the processing of odd lot, packaging .labeling , distrbuting, allotting and etc . Consequently, the legal relations concerned tend to become more complicated .The present author aims to discuss several legal problems arising in the case of IFA's acting as TPLO.The first chapter gives a brief account of how IFA act as TPLO. First, it approaches the subject of TPLO's rise and development form IFA with an introduction of IFA's definition and the history and present situation of the global and domestic forwarding agents. And then it comes to an analysis of TPLO's different legal status while carrying out various acts of law as an agent, carrier, middleman , trustee, acceptor and warehousing operator .Finally it concentrates on the legal relations between TPLO and other parties.The second chapter concerns how TPLO act.as NVOCC. It takes its directions from discussing the similarities and differences between IFA, NVOCC and TPLO .It details TPLO's legal status while he acts as NVOCC and his responsibilities of issuing bills of lading. In conclusion, the author puts forward some original ideas on the legislation management for NVOCC.The third chapter deals with the role played by TPLO as a warehousing operator. This part makes an analysis on the functions performed by TPLO acting as a warehousing operator in modern logistics. Based on this analysis, the author sums up thewarehousing liabilities of TPLO.The fourth chapter mainly focuses on TPLO's legal liabilities and the risk-aversion. Staring with the summary of TPLO's due legal liabilities upon a study of the relations between TPLO and the other parties, this part makes a deeper exploration into their responsibilities and the forms, and then reaches a conclusion that the uniform liability system is fundamental to the development of TPLO.The fifth chapter presents some pioneering thoughts on IFA's acting as TPLO. Processing from the status quo of China's forwarding service, the present author produces a series of suggestions and measures to help surmount the difficulties and obstacles existing in the course of IFA's developing towards TPLO , for example ,the problems of small company scale, simplistic business functions, backward infrastructure, unqualified personnel .outdated business approaches, artificially separated forwarding market, the lack of development planning and legislation protection, allocation of risks and etc. Finally, it comes up with some assumptions on the legislation management for TPLO. Centering around the above -mentioned aspects concerning IFA's acting as TPLO, the present author has made a wide and in-depth analysis in the hope of contributing what little I have to the development Chinese logistics industry.