Connecting Europe: Overcoming challenges and seizing new market opportunities with inland

The European consumer class is projected to grow from 3.7 billion in 2025 to 5 billion by 2030, while spending in the continent’s major cities is expected to rise 2.2 percent in 2025. Yet roughly 9 percent of EU citizens still live in remote areas with limited infrastructure and an ageing demographic.

For logistics professionals, the job is to reach every customer segment quickly, reliably and cost-effectively. That can mean stitching together a patchwork of local carriers, ad-hoc warehousing arrangements, and unreliable processes. Hidden fees are prevalent, costs can spiral, delays inevitable.

However, there is another way. So how can brands leverage Inland to unearth and capitalise on new market opportunities?

Seizing opportunity with a resilient, multimodal network

Meanwhile, secure pick-up lockers and autonomous robots from firms such as Starship Technologies continue to compress the last mile gap, making even isolated postcodes commercially viable.

For brands, only the fastest will survive. If your lead-times or service quality falter, a more agile competitor will claim the growth. With Maersk already operating daily rail, road and barge services across these corridors, scaling into new territories becomes a plug-and-play exercise rather than a multi-vendor project.

Leveraging road, rail and barge for market expansion

2. Rail – For reliability and scale
Electrified rail corridors increasingly rival long-haul road on door-to-door speed, especially to and from land-locked growth cities such as Prague or Vienna. Fixed timetables, lower weather sensitivity, and predictable transit times make rail a natural backbone for inventory destined for regional distribution centres.

3. Barge – For cost efficiency and sustainability
Europe’s inland waterways – the Rhine, Danube, Po and Seine among them. Barges excel on heavy, low-time-pressure goods such as building materials, beverages or bulk retail replenishment. Avoid congested terminals and shorten the duration between departure weeks with barge. With highly flexible and reliable service to upscale or downscale based on market demand.

The real Inland opportunity emerges at the intersections, however. Brands that combine the three modes intelligently can:

• Balance speed with cost – Shift time-critical SKUs to rail during promotional peaks, keep lower-value items on barge and use road for final positioning.
• Buffer against disruption – When spells of hot weather lower the Rhine, divert to rail. When rail delays loom, move high-priority boxes by truck. Flexibility sits inside one contract rather than several.
• Optimise inventory placement – Use rail-served inland terminals as forward stock locations, then replenish satellite markets via short-haul truck or barge runs.

Why a single-partner model wins

To link first-mile ocean and air with middle-mile inland transportation, logistics managers need core capabilities:

How the right single-partner delivers

Our Lead Logistics services combine shipment data with stakeholder management systems to help you see where orders, shipments and inventories are in the supply chain.

Our owned road, rail and barge assets allow same-day re-routing without waiting for third-party allocation.

In practice, a business moving finished electronics from Shenzhen to Slovakia might discharge in Koper, move containers by rail to Budapest, switch to barge via the Danube for inland Croatia and finish the journey by truck. With one partner, each handover happens inside one network – a single booking, unchanged data stream and continuous cargo integrity.