Turkey possesses Europe’s largest truck fleet, 90% of domestic freight by volume is handled by trucking and road transport. Some 850,000 trucks made up fleets across the country.

Akın Arslan
5 min readJul 13, 2020

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Turkey’s strategic location, bridging Europe with the Middle East and Asia, makes it the perfect transport and logistics hub. Turkish logistics market size is USD 150 billion which equals to 14% of GDP of Turkey. 1/3 of total market size is transportation only and 85% of the logistics transportation volume belongs to inland transportation. More than 90% of domestic freight is transported through roadways.

In Turkey, about 450 thousand trucks of goods are carried as FTL per a day. The monthly FTL shipment volume is over 13.5 million trucks. Turkey has the largest truck market in Europe. 1.2 million SRC(authorized) certified truck drivers earn money by transportation.

Highlights of TIRPORT Q2 2020 Report

According to TIRPORT’s Q2 Report, TIRPORT managed 297.657 FTL shipment in the first half of the year. A truck traveled an average of 282 kilometers per shipment. Istanbul-Adana route had the densest truck traffic in Turkey, but also the lowest shipping rates. The highest shipping rates appears on the Istanbul-Hakkari and Istanbul-Diyarbakir lines. Further, the shipping rates for Hakkari can be over 7 thousand TL from time to time. The truck traffic is the busiest at Istanbul-Ankara and Ankara-Adana/Mersin lines.

Hauling return loads is very hard at the Adana, Diyarbakır, Hakkaki, Şırnak and Trabzon cities. If the truck drivers choose to wait, the waiting time for the return load can reach 3.5 days. Mersin and Adana come first among the provinces with the fastest return load availability. Another interesting data is the Kocaeli, Sakarya, Gebze, Balıkesir, and Istanbul lines, which depart from Bursa. Shipping rates on these lines can vary by more than +/- 50% week-to-week depending on instantaneous supply and demand situations.

Life is not easy for the truck drivers. Despite Covid-19, they must keep freight moving during the pandemic.

According to the official data of the General Directorate of Highways (KGM), 90% of the transportation in our country where sea and railways do not develop is made by trucks. 1.2 million truck drivers with SRC Certifications are on the road with 850 thousand trucks.

KGM

In Turkey, over 8,000 logistics/transport company are actively working. Approximately 80 thousand truckers are waiting for loads in nearly 500 motor carriers cooperatives, mostly located around the leading factories and ports.

Among the top 20 companies that manage the biggest operation, the following logistics companies stand out:

Netlog, Ekol, Ceva, Alisan, Mars, Rooster, Borusan, Omsan, Arkas, Gökbora, Barsan, Sertrans, Solmaz, Fevzi Gandur, Reysaş, Orkun, Hilal, Kıta, Taha…

The average FTL shipment of the 5 biggest logistics companies is around 2,500 trucks per day in Turkey. Turkish logistics market is very fragmented, none of logistics companies has able to cap 1% of market.vb

300 thousand trucks take on load from the spot market directly. 500 million TL cash is processed per day in the spot market…

Just one-third of the total shipment have a long-term contract in Turkey. The remaining daily 300 thousand shipment are directly booking in the spot market by trucker and shippers. It is carried out in a closed ecosystem in the triangle of Warehouse-Broker-Plant. The truck owner of the vehicle aspires to ready cargo with commissions of 100–500 TL, depending on the cargo, through brokers on the transportation sites or the vehicle transport brokers, and carries out the transport with simple contracts with the loader.

95% of Trucks on the Roads Belong to Individuals

Over the past two decades, the number of self-owned vehicles which is possessed by large logistics firms engaged in contract logistics has rapidly declined. Increasing costs and heavy burdens of contracts have driven companies away from the self-owned vehicle. In many large logistics companies, the ratio of the self-owned vehicle has dropped below 5%. There are such logistics companies that they carry 2,500 daily transportation and do not have any single self-owned truck. Everyone look for trucks with their own hauling truck systems, primitive methods from truck garages, transportation cooperatives, and web-based shipment sites.

Turkey’s largest logistics company has a capacity of max 3.000 FLT transaction per day. With this volume, it can only has a 0.7% market share. Their self-owned vehicle ratio is around 20%. Moreover, they are trying to keep the 25–30 thousand truck spot candidates ready to reach their portfolio at any time in order to carry out their operations in a proper way. All of them are additional costs :(

In our country, where 90% of the shipments are made by trucks/trailers, the volume of daily shipments is over 1 billion TL.

300 thousand daily FTL Freight are carried out in the spot market outside the span of the logistics firms’ controlled area. TIRPORT (www.tirport.com) digitizing the management of logistics operations in this untouchable area. The Shippers and the carriers come together in the spot market with the TIRPORT YükCEPte Application. TIRPORT’s special payment tool “Param TIRPORT Kart” has started to become the preferred payment tool of the sector. TIRPORT is becoming the Safe Payment Tool between the Shipper and Self-Owned-Truckers.

PARAM TIRPORT Card Became a New Generation Payment Tool of the Logistics Sector

The new generation Param TIRPORT Cards with TIRPASS spec and TROY(Turkish Payment Agency like Visa, Mastercard etc) powered, gives the opportunity of truckers, fuel discounts up to 7% at the pump and give the opportunity to collect freight charges in advance from contracted stations and discount shopping from many member businesses with Param associates. Param TIRPORT card is also a secure payment system between Shippers and Truckers.

TIRPORT is the leading logistics management platform in Turkey. According to TIRPORT Q2 2020 Report, TIRPORT reached 42 thousand active trucker members. It provides operations management services to nearly 500 SMEs and Logistics Companies. TIRPORT also reached out 2,000 shipment per day, aims to exceed 4,000 shipments at the end of 2020. TIRPORT’s 2020 goal is 25,000 shipment per day. According to Crunchbase Data, TIRPORT is #2 Freight Service in Europe:

https://www.crunchbase.com/discover/organization.companies/0b4d472eaf39ce9d261688f52c4ff09e

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