Our story

Crescent Freight was founded in Cairo in 2015 around a simple idea: an Egyptian trader needs one party that handles the freight, the paperwork and the customs clearance together, instead of coordinating a forwarder, a customs broker and an inland carrier who never speak to each other. The work began with ocean freight through the Egyptian seaports, which carry the bulk of goods moving to and from Egypt.

As demand for faster and smaller consignments recurred, air freight was added, then road and rail for regional movements and for the inland legs of a journey. That expansion was not a marketing decision: a customer shipping by sea usually needs an urgent air alternative, and an inland leg that brings the container or the parcel to their door.

Customs clearance stayed at the centre. Daily handling of Egyptian customs and of the document set each commodity requires is what actually determines when cargo leaves the port, so it was kept in-house rather than subcontracted.

On the network side, the company works with shipping lines, airlines and agents across North African and West African destinations and beyond, according to the routing each shipment needs. We do not publish a country count or an agent count, because the figure changes by routing and we hold no fixed number we could evidence.

The current stage is the digital shift: moving what used to run through e-mail threads and phone calls into a platform that holds quote requests, shipment status and documents in one place, while keeping a named person responsible for every shipment. Those systems are being built step by step, and none of them is announced here before it works.