Since the beginning of July 2012, Poland has assumed the annual presidency of the Visegrád Group (V4), which, by acting together to secure the EU budget, is once again gaining importance in Europe. The logistics operator Dachser, conducting operations in all countries of the Group, has been participating in their economic prosperity for years.
Dachser has many regular clients in the Visegrád Group countries, including international corporations. Most often, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary are not treated separately by global investors, but as one region or market. These countries are connected not only by a common history, culture, and values. A consistent point is also a quite decent economic situation – the public debt of the Eurozone is on average 87 percent of GDP, while that of the V4 Group countries is 54 percent of GDP. Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary form a territorially large and economically strong group. If they were one country, they would constitute the 15th largest economy in the world.
– Trade exchange between V4 countries is constantly growing – says Grzegorz Lichocik, CEO of Dachser in Poland. – We see this not only in official statistics but also in our daily work, actively operating in the Central and Eastern European region.
The Visegrád Group countries joined the EU together and are treated as one region by many international corporations. For this reason, Dachser offers them logistics solutions based on a single central warehouse that handles deliveries to recipients located in V4 countries. Thanks to this solution, it is possible to reduce logistics costs, decrease the number of warehouses, administration, and inventory, while maintaining very high delivery quality.
– Dachser, by offering a unified range of international entargo services in 15 European countries in total, as part of one of its variants – targospeed 18, delivers shipments to the recipient by 6:00 PM on the day after collection within a radius of 401 to 1000 km as the crow flies around its terminals. In practice, this means that all shipments sent from Silesia are delivered to most locations within the V4 Group as early as the next afternoon – says CEO Lichocik. – Entrepreneurs with experience in distributing their goods realize how important delivery punctuality and operator reliability are.
A significant part of Dachser‘s activity in the Central and Eastern European region is the implementation of the DIY Logistics service, aimed at suppliers of home and garden stores. As part of this, the operator handles not only warehousing and transport of shipments but also additional services in stores, including merchandising, i.e., placing goods on store shelves, inventory control, and organizing promotions in the sales network. In the V4 Group area, Dachser serves over 800 home and garden stores, and 18,000 across Europe, delivering approximately 2 million shipments to them annually.
In the Visegrád Group area, Dachser European Logistics has 23 branches – 8 in Poland, 7 in the Czech Republic, 3 in Slovakia, and 5 in Hungary.