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20th anniversary of BPO

The road freight industry has been amongst the hardest hit of the transport sectors in Europe. At the worst point of the downturn in mid-2009, Ti estimates that road freight companies’ revenues fell by about a quarter.

The downturn experienced by trucking companies was in line with that seen in the international freight sector, with a major divergence from historic rates of growth which have typically displayed a correlation to GDP. This can be put down to a number of factors. Firstly, the European road freight sector is now highly dependent on the movement of imported goods. Manufacturers and retailers at the outset of the economic downturn found that they had a significant inventory overhang, and reduced the number of orders they were placing with remote suppliers (most based in the Asia Pacific region). This reduced the container flow through European ports as well as break bulk operations and the flow of goods to distribution centres.

Enlargement of the European Union to the East in 2004 opened up the market and trade to Poland, the three Baltic States and Russia. New trade routes were found and demand for the exchange and transshipment of goods to and from the Eastern nations increased.

Demand for the usage of renewable energy power plants in Eastern Europe has increased enormously in the last years but, unfortunately, the industries of these countries are not yet ready to design and produce these innovative power generating systems. Therefore, large generators and windmills need to be shipped eastwards from Western Europe. At the beginning such operations caused a lot of bureaucracy as well as losses of time and money because of the need to build and reconstruct some of the roads and bridges along the way, long permission processes and the inexperienced personnel of transport operators.