Finding margin in European chemical logistics
Frederik DeSmedt of Odyssey Logistics examines how European chemical manufacturers can recover margin through smarter logistics management
The European chemical industry faces intense pressure in 2026. Energy costs remain three to five times higher than in competing regions, Chinese producers have closed the quality gap that once justified European premium pricing and structural overcapacity continues to depress margins across the sector. Demand has not recovered meaningfully since 2023.
Manufacturer priorities have shifted sharply over the past two or three years to meet these new challenges. A previous focus on service performance and capacity availability has evolved into a near total preoccupation with cost. Sustainability performance, which dominated chemical logistics planning discussions as recently as 2023, has largely receded. The industry is now focused on survival.
Logistics sit within this environment as one of the few domains where manufacturers can exercise real control. Unlike energy costs or raw material pricing, freight spend is addressable but only if a manufacturer has genuine visibility into where that spend is going.
For most European chemical shippers, this visibility is more limited than they realise. The most direct route to addressing it is partnering with a specialised logistics provider that combines chemical sector expertise with the analytical capability to model and optimise a freight network systematically.
The fragmentation problem
European manufacturers sometimes underestimate how different their transportation market is from other regions. In the US, double brokerage is
prohibited: a shipper contracting with a carrier can expect that carrier to execute the movement. No equivalent restriction exists in Europe and a single shipment from Finland to Spain may pass through five, six or seven different companies before arriving at its destination.
This fragmentation makes visibility difficult to achieve, in practice. When a shipment moves through multiple operators, many of whom manage small fleets of one to five trucks, the administrative trail becomes hard to follow. Rates negotiated when contracting may bear little resemblance to the actual economics on the ground; invoicing errors accumulate across a volume of transactions that most internal teams cannot feasibly audit and, when delays occur, accountability is difficult to assign.
Many smaller European carriers take the view that no news is good news. If a shipment arrived without incident, no update was required. Shippers who want proactive status information either build this capability themselves or accept a level of uncertainty that, in a cost-conscious environment, is increasingly hard to justify.
European manufacturers learned a concentrated lesson in what uncertainty can cost after Brexit. Cross-Channel shipments became effectively opaque for an extended period, with consignments stuck at borders and moving through multiple carriers.
Many manufacturers who lived through this period concluded they could not afford to operate without credible shipment visibility again, but the demand has remained largely unmet; a fragmented carrier market with multiple layers of subcontracting cannot be made transparent simply by deploying a tracking platform.
Compounding the challenge
The difficulties outlined apply to any European shipper. Chemical manufacturers face additional layers of complexity that make the problem harder to address with generic logistics platforms.
Under the Accord Dangereux Routiers( ADR, the European
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