Europe. Uber. Freight Transport
Tags: Uber, Transportation, Freight Forwarding, Alpegagroup, Ontruck

Europe. Uber. Freight Transport

Hi, my name is Alexey Kozlov, “Vezet Vsem” project (www.vezetvsem.ru).

I would like to continue the theme which I brought up in my previous article. This time I’m going to focus in detail on the market for road freight transportation projects in Europe.

In my opinion, the market for European IT-projects in freight transportation has been growing more aggressive than in the US (I mean number of deals) for the last three years: venture and M&A deals are actively concluded. Perhaps such a practice is due to the key role of road transportation for the EU-economy in comparison with other kinds of transport. Another reason for such a growth can be stable and transparent regulatory framework with control functions.

The table above shows the main players of the European market for road freight transportation, according to the classification described in my first article. Several key points should be highlighted:

1) In Europe freight exchanges are still widely represented (marketplace lite). “Timocom”, “Trans.EU”, “Teleroute” are the main projects with good multilingual adaptation (including the Russian language) in this segment. Appreciable analogue of such platforms in Runet is “ATI.su”. It is worth noting that many exchanges have acquired full functionality of TMS-systems (Transportation management system) and other related services: user verification, collector services. You can’t call them “lite” in terms of development complexity. We classify them in terms of the business model: subscription, consulting and advertising.

2) Many projects merged from offline businesses or created in partnership (internal accelerators) have been appearing in the European market. For example, a company “SalooDO.com” — digital forwarder which has been grown in the internal DHL-accelerator and is focused on backload shipments and returned logistics. It has been tested in Germany and is being tested in the middle East and Africa. It’s the right step in terms of competition. At the same time the customer base of big brother must be helpful for with expansion. Another example: “Drive4Schenker” is a joint project of American marketplace “Uship.com” and German offline giant “DB Schenker”, focused on freight forwarders and carriers. As I understand it, the parent company represents spot orders of its customers on the platform and distributes them between third-party carriers. It is worthwhile to note the cooperation of the flag European uber-project “Sennder” with the car manufacturer SCANIA (one of the investors) and the takeover of startup “CronoTruck” by French giant “Gefco”.

Two factors should be pointed by analysing this table in terms of investment :

1) In 2016–2017 the maximum number of projects in this industry received investments and opportunity to implement their plans. Nine of these projects received more than 1 million dollars.

2) In 2018–2019 only four of mentioned projects were able to continue fund-raising: “Ontruck” and “Sennder” (both were established by “Uber Heavy”), “Movinga”, “QuiQUp”. The “Chronotrack” project has been merged by the strategist. The others have made one investment round so far, but it is more than 13 million dollars on average.

3) In 2019 there was 138 million dollars of venture capital funding. Hundred of it came from “Sender”. Perhaps this aggressive policy is related to the activation of “Uber Freight” in the European market. “Movinga” has collected 92 million dollars for 5 years. Moreover, it has merged its competitor “Move 24” as well.