CLEAR International has issued a new report forecasting the demand for heavy goods trailers in Western Europe to 2018.
At the IAA trade fair in Hannover in September there was pessimism in the air. The trailer industry and its suppliers had had a good first half in 2014 but there was less confidence in the outlook for the last quarter and the beginning of 2015.
On top of this there has been a raft of bad economic news as the euro zone returned to low growth and even Germany just avoided a recession by growing 0.1% in 2014 Q3. The international business media love to foretell disaster.
CLEAR has a different perspective. It is entirely normal when recovering from a recession for there to be a year of little or zero growth in the trailer market and 2015 will be such a year. Indeed it has been part of the CLEAR forecast since 2011. Look back at the recessions of 1993, 2003 and now 2009 and the same pattern is clearly discernible.
What is more, the GDP levels in Germany, France, the UK, Belgium and many smaller economies within Europe are at an all time record high in real terms, not to mention the USA, China etc.
And what about the trailer market in 2014 ? CLEAR forecast 15% growth for 2014 and in the latest report the forecast is now 14.4%.
The CLEAR thesis is that the gloom and doom of recent months has been overdone and that confidence in the economy will return in 2015, leading to substantial growth in the trailer market in 2016.
Gary Beecroft, Managing Director of CLEAR added, “Trailer production, having fallen by 9.8% from the 2011 level, will also have a double digit increase in 2014. However, 10,000 trailers have been wiped from the forecast, much of it as a consequence of the conflict in Ukraine.”
Background
77% of all goods in Europe are moved by road and most of that proportion is transported on a trailer.
The West European Trailer Market Report (November 2014), with forecasts to 2018, can be obtained from CLEAR using the contact details below. A new report for the East European market was issued in October 2014.
