The transport industry in Poland faces mounting cost pressure as oil prices surge, driving a sharp rise in business closures and insolvencies in the sector.
Poland has long leveraged its geographical advantage to serve as a critical logistics hub connecting Central and Eastern Europe with Western Europe. However, since the United States and Israel launched military strikes against Iran in February this year, fuel prices have kept rising, plunging Poland's transport industry into an unprecedented crisis.
Andrzej Szymanski is a managing director of a transport and logistics company in Poland with over 20 years of operating history and a fleet of more than 500 trucks, where fuel costs have long constituted a major share of operational expenditure. Szymanski said that the company has never encountered a crisis as severe as the current one.
"Today, with this huge increase of fuel price, we are losing money because this increase is unexpected and huge in a very short time. So we have a problem to deal with it. We don't have a good solution because such situation never happened before. And we weren't prepared for it. Our cost increased over 20 percent in this short period of time. And we are in really very, very difficult situation because nobody can handle so huge increase in so short time," said Szymanski.
Rising transportation costs have triggered a wave of bankruptcies among Polish transport enterprises. Latest data showed that more than 700 transport companies in Poland have declared bankruptcy this year.
"There is a lot of smaller or medium sized companies on the market with a not so strong financial situation. They unfortunately [went] bankrupt because they don't have money. They are not able to survive," Szymanski said.
The industry professional also emphasized that the impact of the sharp oil price surge will not be confined to the transport sector, and will eventually be transmitted to the consumer end. He predicted that the ultimate cost of the oil price hike crisis would, in all likelihood, be borne by the public.
Polish transport companies topple amid surge in oil prices
Polish transport companies topple amid surge in oil prices
