In an exclusive interview with Value Chain Asia, Marco Civardi, Managing Director of Noatum Logistics Asia, argued that the compounding frequency of global supply chain disruptions has made fixed planning a structural liability. In the five years to 2026, global networks absorbed a pandemic, a sustained US-China escalation, multi-year Middle East route disruptions and a manufacturing geography reset triggered by US tariff policy.

Civardi leads the Asia operations of Noatum Logistics, part of AD Ports Group, the Abu Dhabi-listed ports, logistics and maritime conglomerate that has been expanding its footprint across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe and South America. In 2026 the Group acquired the Germany-based freight forwarder MBS Logistics and, in its first move into South America, Brazil’s leading agri-bulk port operator CLI. “The frequency of such disruptions creates a ‘new normal’ where constant reframing is now a necessity and where the old mantra of ‘planning’ would need to be replaced by ‘intent’,” he says. For Civardi the two are mechanically different: planning is a fixed path optimised for known conditions; intent is a destination that holds constant while the path is continuously revised.

The practical implication is that business continuity planning has moved from a periodic exercise to a permanent operating mode. For Noatum, that has meant building the capability to rapidly re-route cargo, switch transport modes and secure alternative carrier capacity so client inventory keeps moving when primary lanes are affected. The Middle East disruption, which forced a reassessment of Red Sea corridor dependency, is the most recent example of a pattern that has repeated across geographies. An operator built for a single optimised route cannot absorb that without extended lead times and elevated costs; one built for continuous contingency can act immediately.

The decisions that genuinely cannot be made quickly are, by Civardi’s assessment, the ones that matter most. “While you can re-route shipments quickly, you cannot instantly change your network footprint or create capacity where it does not exist.” Network-footprint decisions require years to execute, and the operators that made those investments in anticipation of customer sourcing shifts, rather than in response to them, hold a structural advantage when those shifts materialise. Noatum has been positioning itself around “where the customers are going”, building deeper coverage in the markets its clients are moving toward rather than the ones current trade volumes favour, with Africa a corridor it sees still developing as regional infrastructure and intra-continental trade mature.

The routing logic that follows is customer-driven rather than carrier-driven. “For us, network planning is driven less by carriers and more by our customers’ sourcing and manufacturing decisions,” Civardi says. “Our routing strategies subsequently follow the options our carriers can offer, whether through direct port calls or a hub-and-spoke model.” The framing inverts the conventional sequence: carriers and routes are selected to serve customer geography, not the other way around.

The contingency-modality question is where sea-air solutions have moved from a premium option to a practical default. Sea-air combines an ocean leg with an air leg through a transit hub, capturing part of air’s speed at substantially lower cost than full air freight. “Sea-air solutions can help relieve infrastructure bottlenecks and control costs,” Civardi notes, “especially when switching an entire shipment from ocean to full air would include significant costs.” For electronics with tight replenishment windows, or fashion under a seasonal deadline, the calculation is often straightforward — and it requires carrier relationships at the transit hub, which returns to the footprint argument.

The multi-origin environment compounds the complexity. Brands operating production across China, Vietnam, India and the wider ASEAN region manage parallel flows from multiple regulatory frameworks, carrier networks and customs jurisdictions at once. “Capability needs vary by market maturity — some Asian markets require rapid scaling of capacity and talent, while others place greater weight on B2C last-mile execution and sector-specific expertise,” Civardi says. The commercial dynamics differ too: “the time and effort required to create a partnership in Japan can be very different than that in Vietnam.”

Visibility is the layer that makes the rest work — the infrastructure on which contingency routing and multi-origin coordination depend. AD Ports Group has unified trade and logistics data across its businesses into what Civardi describes as “a single digital coordination hub” that delivers live trade-lane intelligence and bookable alternative multimodal routings. But he is careful about what technology can do alone: the platform works because the physical network underneath it has the carrier relationships, licensed capacity and operational reach to route through.

Civardi’s prescription is specific: clear communication at a regular cadence, and a view of the external environment that maps opportunities as rigorously as it maps risks. The operators positioned for what comes next, in his framing, are those that have already placed their networks where customer sourcing is heading, built the carrier and modal relationships to act when conditions change, and constructed the data infrastructure to make that action visible in real time. Planning optimises for a world that no longer holds still; intent is built to keep moving when it does not.