Logistics warns of "irreversible" loss of competitiveness: "There are businesses barely surviving"

BarcelonaLogistics holds positions of dubious privilege on the lists of sectors most affected by the international turbulence of the last half-decade. The pandemic practically halted all freight traffic, and industry has not managed to catch its breath. Without having surfaced, wars —first in Ukraine and then in Iran— have further deepened the crisis. To an international context difficult to navigate, as warned by the president of the Logistics Cluster of Catalonia, Ignasi Sayol, is added a Catalan context far from ideal: "We are suffering an irreversible loss of competitiveness. We are talking about the disappearance of companies and companies that are barely surviving, with no capacity to invest," he warned.

The cluster, in collaboration with the logistics sector of the Catalan SME employers' association, Pimec, published this Thursday the annual report on the contribution of logistics to the Catalan economy, with consolidated data from 2023. The document confirms that this segment of industry contributes slightly more than 10% to the Catalan GDP: 3.6% is concentrated in purely logistics activities, around freight transport, while the remaining 6.4% arises from "intermediate consumptions", such as storage costs, immologistics (logistics real estate) and other tangential activities, but carried out by logistics companies.

Sayol, however, warns that the trend in recent years is worrying: only accessory parts have grown in value, while the core of the business has fallen in the last decade by about one point, from 4.3% of gross value added (GVA, an indicator that measures economic activity), the contribution of the logistics fabric to the overall economy of the Principality.

Impossible to absorb inflation

"Since the pandemic, things have gone very badly for us", laments the president of the business group, who makes a clear diagnosis: sector productivity has plummeted in recent years, with a drop in value added per worker close to 4% in the analyzed period. The Catalan economy as a whole, on the contrary, has seen its general efficiency soar by 12.5%, according to Sayol, who detects in the companies in his environment, mostly SMEs, an "irreversible loss of competitiveness".

The burden for the sector, according to the business leader, is labor costs, which have grown by more than 67% in the last decade, well above the 52% increase in general terms in Catalonia. For Sayol, the increase does not fit with the evolution of logistics activity and responds more to a poor fit of the collective agreement with the set of companies. In Catalonia, it should be remembered, logistics companies are governed by the sectoral transport agreement, and do not have their own. "The profiles are different, and the costs are different", considers the president of the cluster.

To this added expense is added the general inflation of oil, which particularly hits an industry that depends heavily on the price of diesel. The increase in expenses due to these two factors, however, cannot be passed on to the sector's prices, because "the large shippers [importers and exporters of goods] do not accept it".

The situation "has not improved"

"Logistics is treated as a commodity, at auction," denounced Sayol. With this burden of expenses, only a third of the VAB of logistics companies can be allocated to investments, surpluses, and depreciations. "Some say that we entrepreneurs earn a lot of money, but I don't know which ones. This is the reality," he lamented.

Although the latest consolidated data corresponds to 2023, Sayol has denied that the evolution since then has been positive. "If anything, things have worsened," lamented the employers' representative. The war in Iran, in particular, has multiplied the tension that Catalan logistics companies have to bear, due to the general cost of energy.

The situation is such, he warned, that "businesses are disappearing" due to the hole in the accounts that soaring fuel is causing. Transport and storage in such poor health, he concludes, can hinder the overall performance of Catalan industry: "If we want a competitive productive fabric, we need efficient logistics".