Waberer’s Group successfully completed another acquisition. The company acquired 51% of Petrolsped Group, one of Hungary’s rail logistics service providers active in Europe. In line with its strategic goals, Waberer’s has entered the special transport segment that currently mainly uses rail services.
With the transaction, Waberer’s Group is taking a significant step towards building its multimodal service portfolio and developing its rail logistics capabilities. Thanks to the move, the Hungarian market-leading complex logistics service provider better meets the European Union’s requirement that long-distance transport tasks should be performed as much as possible with the help of rail. Through the integration of Petrolsped’s experience, customer portfolio and assets, Waberer’s will have all the necessary capabilities to become a competitive and significant player in the domestic and regional rail-based logistics market.
The above move is in line with Waberer’s Group strategy to become number one complex logistics provider in Central and Eastern Europe by 2027. The company, which is already dominant at European level, plans to achieve significant growth through further investments, acquisitions, infrastructure development, diversification of its activities and increased added value among its services.
The decisive market position of Petrolsped is shown by the fact that it has been among the TOP 3 players in the ranking of railway companies’ revenues in recent years. The Group – partly with its own railway vehicles – provides fixed-track freight forwarding services focusing mainly on the territory of Hungary and Romania, both directly and through its subsidiaries (Pultrans and PSP Cargo Romania). Since 1997, Petrolsped has built up a diverse service portfolio that provides great flexibility to serve both mass and special rail transport needs. Most of these services are available in Europe in addition to Hungary and the region. Like Waberer’s road transport business, Petrolsped combines flexible transport services with subcontractors and rail transport services with its own locomotive and wagon portfolio. The main groups of goods supplied by the company include, among others, agricultural products, raw materials for construction or power plants, oil products and vehicles. In addition, Petrolsped is in the final phase of the construction of a modern intermodal terminal in southern Hungary, which is expected to serve as a basis for supporting intermodal transport between the Balkans and Western Europe as early as 2024. The Petrolsped Group achieved consolidated sales of €53m in 2022 with EBIT of €3.8m, taking into account the member companies acquired under this transaction.
“In connection with the closing of the acquisition that the company sees significant growth opportunities in rail freight forwarding, partly because of new domestic industrial and automotive investments, and on the other hand, because their existing customers are increasingly turning to low-carbon logistics services. He highlighted that Waberer’s strategy aims to make the Group the number one complex logistics service provider in the region. Previously, customers considered this only to a limited extent, in recent years as an alternative solution, and now in many cases as a preferred mode of transport. Waberer’s decided to acquire the company in order to serve these changed requirements as widely as possible and to exploit the business potential arising from the traditional rail transport and modern intermodal service needs. With this move, the company’s domestic, regional or even European rail transport capability is immediately available, so it can serve any rail transport needs in the future.” says Zsolt Barna, Chairman, Waberer’s International Nyrt.
Source: Waberer’s
