Haulage companies specialising in steel transportation in western European countries currently have ample capacities to offer, but are struggling to lower their prices to attract jobs, Kallanish learns from market participants.
“The situation is completely the other way round now than it was one year ago,” says a steel service centre manager in the Benelux. Back then, capacities and personnel, especially drivers, were hard to come by.
Things turned worse last December, when in Germany the road toll increased considerably by means of a CO₂-surcharge. Günther+Schramm (G+S), a distributor of special bar qualities, wrote to customers at the beginning of this year of an “unprecedented increase”, meaning a doubling of costs.
A truck with a permissible total weight of 18 tonnes paid €0.18 ($0.2) per km before the surcharge, which then increased the toll by €0.16 cents.
For a company with the portfolio of G+S, this meant an increase of transport costs per order by 5-10%, it says. It notes that small and medium-sized transport companies already had to bring up their fees over recent years to cover costs.
Capacities in recent years were short not because of a lack of trucks, but because of a lack of drivers. Many drivers came from Poland, and then went back there during the Covid period, partly also because Polish wages had risen to match German wages.
G+S noted that haulers specialising in steel would be particularly hard hit, and their customers with them. “If some of them [haulers] disappear from the market on account of the extra costs, the steel processing sector will be facing big problems,” it wrote.
Rebar bender group Atterer told customers over the summer that the increased toll means the standard price per load of €90 is now already exhausted after a distance 40km.
Despite those concerns, the shortage of capacities is no longer an issue, now that order activity all along the steel value chain is weak.
A manager at a Frankfurt-based rebar distributor agrees with the observation of the Benelux manager, and says that he recently received offers from that region. Not without humour, he states that Luxembourg is especially rich with steel transportation vehicles: “Sometimes you get the impression that every other farm has a trailer in its yard,” he quips.
However, he does not expect that prices for transport will drop much. “I cannot see the haulers’ prices are sinking; they need to cover pretty high costs themselves,” he concludes.
Christian Koehl Germany
