How many haulage carriers operate within the Polish market?
According to the most recent data of 30 June 2014, the Polish statistical register (REGON) includes 3,643,117 active companies. As many as 224,355 entities have been enlisted in section ‘H’ (“Transport and warehouse management”) according to the Polish Statistical Classification of Economic Activities (PKD), which constitutes 6.2% of all the active companies. For the purposes of this text, our attention should be directed primarily at:
- 131,184 companies which operate as road hauliers (58.5%);
- 4,216 companies which conduct parcel and postal services (1.9%);
- 3,409 entities related to urban and suburban passenger land transport (1.5%).
Road haulage sector
As it has been already mentioned, road haulage dominates the industry of transport services, while companies that operate within this field constitute 3.6% from among all the registered companies. A downward trend in the number of companies that operate within this sector has been apparent since several years. In the middle of 2010, there has been 145,470 active entities registered, which means that their number decreased by 9.8% throughout four years (when compared to the current data). However, according to information published by the Polish Central Statistical Office (GUS), we can notice that the number of companies which operate within road haulage sector has remained stable in the last year, reaching the level of about 131 thousand entities.
Characteristics of companies which operate within the road haulage sector
Majority of active entities operating within the road haulage sector has been registered in the three following voivodeships: mazowieckie (16.7%), śląskie (12.2%) and wielkopolskie (10.4%). As far as the legal form of business is concerned, most of the companies are individual economic activities (in 9 of 10 cases) as well as civil partnerships and limited liability companies. Furthermore, analysis of employment within the concerned industry reveals that over 97% of companies employ not more than nine persons. The below chart presents detailed information on that scope.
Polish market of international haulage
Although the overall number of companies that operate within the road haulage sector has decreased in recent years, their scope of activities outside the territory of Poland is constantly developing. In the past four years, the number of licences on international road transport has increased from 24,895 to 29,488. This means that over 4.5 thousand new entities that provide international road haulage services have been established in this period, which constitutes a significant increase by 18.4%. The below chart presents detailed indicators for individual years.
According to recent data of 31 December 2014, almost 29.5 thousand companies occupied with international transport of goods dispose of 168,645 vehicles in total. It is worth noticing that the number of heavy vehicles used for that purpose increases each year, similarly to increase in the number of companies. It turns out that increase by almost 23% in the number of issued licences on international road haulage has been noticed throughout the last four years. Companies, which dispose of 2 to 4 vehicles (40.1%), dominate the sector concerned in this work. Those that manage a fleet of over 50 vehicles constitute a tiny fraction, amounting to only one per mille.
Analysis of vehicles used for international road haulage reveals that majority of them are lorries of maximum authorised mass exceeding 20 tonnes. Currently, the sector includes almost 122 thousand vehicles of such type, which constitutes 72.3% of all vehicles. What is more, it is worth noticing that the vehicles are becoming newer and newer each year. About 67.4% of them have passed the eco-friendly certification tests (Euro4 or higher).
