Transportation & Logistics

Deregulation and globalisation are the driving forces behind the development of the transportation and logistics sectors today.

In the past years, the trend towards deregulation and the impacts of consolidation in the transportation and logistics sectors have increased significantly. Liberalisation, for instance, has helped shape the market environment of different sectors to a large extent and, owing to the privatisation of Deutsche Lufthansa (transportation) and Deutsche Post (logistics) long ceased to be a foreign concept for most of us.

The pressure to consolidate has developed differently for many sectors, going along with the deregulation of formerly regulated markets. In the aviation sector, for instance, new competitors (Ryanair, Air Berlin) have emerged, while long-established players disappeared from the market or were acquired by others (LTU).

International players increasingly enter the German public road and rail market and have gained significant market shares in recent years, namely Arriva (GB), Veolia (F), Transdev (F) and First Group (GB). The market environment for privately held medium-sized companies has tightened radically and has led to a surge in the sale of medium-sized companies to larger market participants, such as Autobus Sippel and Verkehrsbetriebe Bils to Arriva (2005 and 2006), Verkehrsgesellschaft Mittelhessen to Abellio (2006), Sterzenbach Group to Transdev (2006) and Arthur Merl to First Group (2007).

While the German transport market was mainly characterised by liberalisation, the logistics sector saw increasing globalisation of its markets and the trend towards global network extension. Despite this trend, however, dominating competitors in the logistics sector have failed to gain significant market shares compared to the market as a whole despite their size and global presence. Although the consolidation wave has held up for some time now and the larger market participants constantly expand their networks through acquisitions, an end of consolidation is not to be expected in the medium term. The logistics sector will continue to see increased M&A activity in the future.

HSH Corporate Finance is your ideal partner for M&A transactions in the transportation and logistics sectors. We have advised on domestic transactions (e.g. sale of Kraftverlehrsgesellschaft Dreiländereck to Abellio), on cross-border transactions with German participation (e.g. sale of Autobus Sippel to Arriva from Great Britain, participation of the Australian infrastructure investment group Babcock & Brown to Hamburger Hochbahn subsidiary BeNEX) as well as in international transactions (e.g. sale of Tampa Cargo to Avianca).

Please contact us for further information on our references in this sector.