GEFCO handles large portion of automotive logistics in Bulgaria
The Bulgarian subsidiary of the GEFCO Group, GEFCO Bulgaria, is currently engaged in automotive logistics inside the country, being responsible for a large portion of its automotive business.
According to data from the European Automobile Manufacturers Association, in 2015, the company managed to transport nearly 50,000 vehicles inside Bulgaria, with 10,750 of them being reserved for the domestic market. These +10,000 units represent 37% of the local market numbers.
Having had experience inside the country for the last couple of years, the Balkans Area Manager and General Manager of GEFCO Bulgaria & Romania, Jérôme Chevrolet is talking about the company’s offer and customer needs: ‘More and more clients have been searching for a professional service where delivery time, security management and integrity of vehicle logistics have high importance, as well as the ability to cover every activity on the supply chain’. The General Manager goes on to say that ‘this is the basis on which we built our automotive offer’.
The company has been operating for over 60 years, making a European leader out of itself, according to Jérôme Chevrolet. GEFCO is an international provider of industrial and automotive logistics services, offering solutions for finished vehicles. Locally, it operates out of a 25,000 square meter facility in Sofia (Bulgaria), with a storage capacity of 1,400 vehicles. Currently, the company has 33 of these storage facilities all around the world.
GEFCO uses personal and leased vehicles for car transport, including 2.400 car transporters and 3.250 rail wagons. It is also estimated that the car carriers would have traveled 40 million kilometers combined, by the end of 2016, in Bulgaria alone. The company has been operating in the country for the last five years, having transported close to 207.000 vehicles for local and international markets.
Overall, Bulgaria’s automotive industry is on the rise, according to data from market research analysts working for Technavio. Accordingly, the country is expected to witness a growth rate of around 4%. Vehicle registrations have also increased, in the last years, with documents for 130.000 new cars, in 2014. In 2015, for instance, most of the automotive market share was reserved for electrical and electronic equipment, at 70%.
The country is considered to be fragmented, having offices, dealerships and logistics centers for more than 200 manufacturers for vehicles and vehicle parts.
