Cross-trade 2024: what has changed on the market?
- Wojciech Paprocki
- 5 sie
- 5 minut(y) czytania
For carriers registered in Poland, whether with domestic or foreign capital, the provision of road freight transport services outside the country is a significant area of their economic activity. This category of services includes transport related to: (1) servicing Polish foreign trade, (2) transport between other EU countries, known as cross-trade, and (3) transport within other EU countries, known as cabotage. In addition to its commercial significance at the enterprise level, this activity by carriers creates exports of services from Poland and contributes to an increase in foreign currency inflows to the country.
Repeated official statements and media comments over the years have shaped the perception in Europe that Polish carriers have established a significant presence in the European market, accounting for approximately one-fifth of the road transport work on a continental scale.
As carriers in Poland are expressing concern about their position and pointing to increasing pressure on the market from carriers from other countries, it is reasonable to take a closer look at the situation in the European market in 2024 compared to the situation in 2023. The analysis was based on cross-trade data published by Eurostat on July 29, 2025, and data published in July 2024.
This commentary includes the author's interpretation of the statistical data, formulated using knowledge gathered during research on the land transport services market in Europe from 2019 to the end of the first half of 2025.
Firstly, carriers from Poland were and remain leaders on the European market
The data compiled in Table 1 covers 11 routes from the TOP 20. These are the routes with the largest cargo flow in bilateral trade between shippers and their partners from EU countries. As we can see, carriers registered in Poland handled the largest volume of trade between EU countries compared to carriers from other third countries. Of the routes listed, the share of Polish carriers increased on nine. The year-on-year change is not significant, which confirms that the position of Polish carriers is stable.
The position on the European market, developed over many years, allowed Polish carriers to confirm their involvement in three routes in 2024, with a share exceeding 50% of total transport. In the routes shown in Fig. 1 between Germany and France, Belgium and Germany, and France and the Netherlands, the combined shares of carriers from the exporting country and the importing country were lower than the share of carriers from Poland. In the other four routes in 2024, the share of carriers from Poland exceeded 33% - also, for the first time, in the route between the Czech Republic and Germany.
In the route between Germany and the Netherlands, which handled the largest volume of cargo of all the TOP 20 routes in the EU, the share of carriers from Poland is the largest among carriers from third countries. It increased in 2024 to 28.8%, i.e. by 2.4%, compared to the share in 2023.
Table 1 Selected relations from the TOP 20 EU trade exchanges in which road carriers registered in Poland are leaders in cross-trade transport services
Fig. 1 Cross-trade relations from the TOP 20 European trade in goods, in which the share of carriers from Poland exceeds 50% of the volume of cargo transported
In 2024, the challenge for road carriers registered in Poland was to maintain the potential achieved in 2022, when the volume of trade within the EU was rebuilt after the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Particularly large expenditures were incurred to retain drivers who accept cross-trade assignments, i.e., staying away from their permanent place of residence for many weeks. In the relations presented in Fig. 1, thanks to the employment of a sufficiently large number of drivers in 2024, it was possible to improve the results achieved in 2023, which can be interpreted as a signal that recruiting drivers in other countries is even more difficult than in Poland, and that entrepreneurs in Poland are relatively best at coping with this challenge.
Secondly, they are after us! (but this is fake news)
In two geographical relationships in 2024, Lithuanian carriers took over the role of carriers with the largest market share. In the exchange of goods between Spain and France (the volume of exports from the former exceeds the volume of exports from the latter) in 2023, carriers from Poland were the leaders in cross-trade, while in 2024, this position was taken over by carriers from Lithuania. A similar situation occurred in the trade between Germany and Spain. This is no coincidence. Since Lithuanian carriers directed more trucks from Germany to the Iberian Peninsula, they sought additional loads from this region and found them among Spanish exporters sending their goods in the opposite direction, i.e. to France.
An in-depth analysis of the data in Table 2 shows that Lithuanian carriers took the lead with only a fractional change in the share of all carriers, including those from the exporting and importing countries, in the service of individual relational markets. The changes were within one percentage point.
There were also leader changes in two other relations: in the trade between Spain and Portugal and between Poland and Slovakia. Analysis of this data reveals that one should be cautious in drawing far-reaching conclusions. Cars registered by German carriers took the lead from Romanian carriers across the Spanish-Portuguese border. However, the scale of these transports was limited to approximately 30 transports per day carried out by trucks registered in EU countries other than Spain and Portugal. If 20% of these vehicles were registered in Germany, then statistical data shows that an average of only 7 vehicles per day at the border was enough for German carriers to take the lead from Romanian carriers.
Even more evident is the insignificant role of Hungarian carriers in the economic exchange between Poland and Slovakia. In 2024, they took the leading position in cross-trade from Romanian carriers. To achieve this position, it was probably sufficient that an average of four trucks registered in Hungary crossed the Polish-Slovak border every day. In 2024, an average of approximately 1,200 trucks registered in Poland crossed this border every day.
Table 2 Four cross-trade markets in the EU where there was a change in leadership in 2024 compared to 2023 (markets included in the TOP 20 in the EU)
The basic conclusion from the analysis of the data included in Table 2 is as follows. The slogan “they are after us!” is justified in very specific circumstances and does not reflect the actual role of carriers registered in individual EU member states on the EU market. This slogan cannot therefore, be invoked in a thorough assessment of the situation of Polish carriers on the European market as an argument for the existence of particular problems among road carriers in Poland.
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