Guten Tag Canada! German truckers look for fresh start in the Dominion

TORONTO — Reinhard Hollenhorst, owner of 25-truck fleet HTI Spedition in Munster, Germany, has gotten to the point where he believes he’s seen the best trucking days Deutschland has to offer.

Thinking of closing up shop and starting new somewhere overseas, Hollenhorst sent his daughter Anja and associate Thorsten Schaefer on a scouting expedition to Southern Ontario earlier this summer. After a week of touring the region and talking to a variety of Canadian transportation folks, Anja and Thorsten called up Today’s Trucking and asked if they could come to the office for some perspective on the small fleet landscape in Canada.

Turns out they had a better story to tell than we did. Anja says her dad sent her and Thorsten to gather information on the Canadian trucking industry and look for business opportunities on this side of the pond. Specifically, says Anja, she’s on the hunt for a small fleet — preferably along the Southern Ontario Hwy. 401 corridor — that could be available for purchase.

“At the moment we’re just investigating,” she says. “We still have to collect much information.”

Anja Hollenhorst and parents, owners of HTI Spedition want
to see what trucking is like on this side of the pond

The ideal company, adds Thorsten, is one with a small pool of established contracts, currently in the hands of an owner in the twilight of his career.

The two aren’t too picky about sectors at this point. HTI Spedition is experienced in a variety of applications: general freight, warehousing and logistics, oversized, dangerous goods, and containerization –although the carrier dropped that business a couple years ago when
“rates plummeted” in Germany.

One of the carrier’s other major operations likely wouldn’t help them much in North America’s eat-or-be-eaten environment. It’s a trucking practice called “groupage” where dozens of small carriers band together and pool their resources to size up the behemoths of German transport.

“Our trucks all meet in the center of Germany and everyone takes a share and delivers it across the country for next-day delivery,” says Thorsten. “Big companies don’t have to do that because they all have their own direct lines from city to city.”

While divvying up freight may be a small carrier’s best hope in a few circumstances, Anja says it’s partly Europe’s centralized, socialist-leaning policies and confiscatory taxation that’s driving people like her father out of trucking.

“Things are good for [HTI] now, but my father is thinking of the future of his kids and our kids,” says Anja. “He wants to sell because of the situation there. The policies are not very pro-business.”

Worse, adds Thorsten, is the EU, which takes heavily from the pockets of German taxpayers and businesses to subsidize the enrollment of new, poorer, nations into the union.

Leaving are big manufacturing companies that move to cheaper countries in Eastern Europe and Asia, and arriving in return are a flood of truck drivers from those nations who Anja says are cannibalizing the rates.

“The Russians, for example, will send their drivers and they don’t go home for four weeks. They work in lots of European countries for very cheap,” says Anja. “At the moment you have lots of businesses saying ‘should I work? Why should I work?'”

The Hollenhorsts still want to work, but they want a change of scenery. To them, the landscape looks good from here.