• Colorful induction ceremony of Jeffrey Preston Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon. com, to the Logistics Hall of Fame.
• Logistics sector honours the achievements of the U.S.-American Internet pioneer.
• Roy Perticucci, Vice President Amazon Europe Customer Fulfillment, accepts the certificate on behalf of Bezos at the German Federal Ministry of Transport in Berlin.
It's now official: on Thursday, Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, was inducted into the world´s logistics pantheon. 170 international guests of honour from politics, science, industry and the media accepted the invitation of the Logistics Hall of Fame to celebrate the successful Internet pioneer in the historic Erich Klausener Hall of the German Transport Ministry in Berlin.
The guests, including Amazon management from Europe and Germany, accompanied Roy Perticucci, Vice President Amazon Europe Customer Fulfillment, with big applause, when he was presented the membership certificate made of glass and metal on behalf of Jeff Bezos.
Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Michael ten Hompel, Managing Director of the Fraunhofer IML and himself a member of the Hall of Fame, gave a rousing laudatory speech to the new member. He paid tribute to Bezos' entrepreneurial performance, which not only reinvented Internet commerce and the media world through the combination of software and logistics, but also provided a blueprint for a new Logistics 4.0. Bezos thus joins the ranks of the big industrial visionaries such as Daimler, Siemens and Edison.
Jeff Bezos is the 33rd member of the logistics pantheon. He was elected in September by an international expert jury from a total of 17 candidates from eight countries.
Members of the Logistics Hall of Fame include UPS founder James Casey, Fedex founder Frederick Smith, entrepreneur and logistics benefactor Klaus-Michael Kühne as well as the contract logistics pioneers Heinz Fiege and Hugo Fiege or Austrian logistics entrepreneur Heidi Senger-Weiss. Amoung others posthumously voted into the Hall of Fame include the post office founders of Thurn und Taxis, truck inventor Gottlieb Daimler, Gottfried Schenker as a pioneer of combined transportation, assembly line inventors Henry Ford and Ransom Eli Olds, Eugene Clark, the inventor of the forklift truck, Malcom McLean, father of containerisation, and Japanese Toyota manager Taiichi Ohno, who invented the just in time-concept.
The initiative is supported by the German Federal Ministry of Transport as well as the relevant sector associations, media and companies, including the Port of Duisburg (duisport), Gebrüder Weiss, logistics insurer Kravag, intralogistics provider Still, the Federal Central Cooperative for Road Transport (SVG) and the TimoCom freight exchange.
The Hall can be accessed free of charge at any time at www.logisticshalloffame.net and features information and photos on logistics milestones and the people behind them.