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Gary Beecroft, CLEAR International Consulting
Whenever CM's regular market watcher Gary Beecroft presents a graph on Western Europe trailer production it always grabs the attention. The overall market has certainly moved on since 1985 when 70,000 units were built. Indeed our roundtable panellists were left in no doubt as to how busy trailer-makers were in 2007. "Last year was a massive year, with the highest figure ever of 275,000 trailers produced," Beecroft announced.
The European trailer market continues to be cyclical, with most decades experiencing both expansion and contraction. Yet the overall upward trend continues inexorably. "What's influenced the Western European picture is that Eastern Europe is now pulling in around 100,000 new trailers a year - three or four times what it was a few years ago," noted Beecroft. "And a lot of that demand is being supplied by the big German companies." (see panel below.) As well as having the top three trailer-makers as domestic residents, Germany also enjoys the biggest trailer market in Europe. Last year it had 130,000 of them. "It's a shocking quantity - in fact we have to put them on another scale on a graph!" exclaimed Beecroft. "The other surprise to me was that although the second biggest market is France (with 27,000), Poland was almost as big - it increased by 60%. And on top of the...