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T hey say the Dutch are natural traders and world travellers.
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Henk Buzink, the Dutch-born boss of Fransen Transport, was reminded of that recently when he was walking through the Worcestershire countryside: "I was just on my way to get a newspaper at the weekend when I saw this hot air balloon land nearby. The guy asked me where he was and when I answered he said 'What's a Dutchman doing in the middle of this field?'... I guess it's a small country!"
After three decades of running the Kidderminster-based controlled temperature specialist, Buzink might be forgiven for thinking he'd 'gone native'. However, his career path in road transport could well have been different had he followed his original impulse.
Thirty years ago former merchant seaman Buzink was getting itchy feet working in the traffic office of Fransens, the Rotterdam-based
operator. "After two years I thought this sill transport game wasn't going to be my futur so I resigned," he says. Fortunately hi employers had other ideas. "They said no w don't want to lose you," he recalls. "So I cam, over here with my wife in 1972."
Fransen UK was originally set up as wholly owned subsidiary in Hereford befor. moving to its current site in Kidderminster. A the time its parent company was keen t■ expand into the then-unknown UK market "We were always going to be internationa transporters," Buzink explains. "Fransen: wanted to get into the UK market—it was peculiar market. There had been a dock strila and a lot of cargo was going through Dove and that's how we got involved."
Fransen UK soon started to expand it reefer business, and not just travelling east "Meat started to come out of Ireland and ir those days they had no fridges—you can' imagine it now," says Buzink.
Throughout the years the company's focu! is remained the same: "We're not huge, but eve always been pioneers. We've often
■ und ourselves going into a new market, Len as that one gets saturated you move into ,mething new again."
By the late eighties the "new" market was le Soviet Union and Fransen UK was one of te first western operators to break into it— id it was like nothing the company had ever Icountered before.
.ocal mess
[here was a huge local mess out there," says uzink. "No services and a real need for transort. In the beginning Russia was quite a chal.nge. Nobody had ever heard of half the laces we had to deliver to. We'd heard of loscow but that was only about half the way ) some of our destinations! In the first days eople loved to see western trucks, but that all rianged with the robberies and organised rime. In Russia we used to take a guard." Good times in transport are frequently
short-lived and by the mid-nineties Buzink had had enough of the Russian market: "We did our last run to Moscow. We still do
a bit in the old Eastern Bloc, but the Russian trade has been taken over by cheaper Eastern Bloc hauliers. Their drivers earn a fortune by their terms. You get used to this kind of thing—but they were very interesting times!"
Nowadays Fransens is back in Western Europe with a modest controlled-tempera ture fleet hauling high-value goods includ
ing pharmaceuticals. Special freight makes up the biggest proportion of its business
today but Buzink is understandably coy about naming his customers, not least as niche markets can be overcrowded overnight: "It's really a few large companies
nowadays. We've been dealing with one or two but I wouldn't like to say exactly who—it's very soughtafter work!"
So are there any niche markets left to get into? "It's a good question!" says Buzink. "There's still room for what I'd call 'reliable groupage' of chilled and frozen products. It's so much easier now we have dual-controlled temperature and doubledeck trailers. That facility has still to be taken a long way— Britain has been very slow to take up that concept whereas it's more common on the Continent."
But even Buzink admits it's harder and harder to spot the new niches, "unless 1 'm missing something!". Five years ago Fransen was running under the Nedlloyd Road Cargo banner (its Dutch parent had been bought by the major Netherlands maritime group). But as Buzink says: "Nobody liked it, especially our customers." Then in 1998 Nedlloyd sold the Fransen UK operation to the Belgian EFT group. Buzink welcomed the move; not least because it enabled the company to regain its previous identity: "We eventually went back to our original name that the customers know. We've always been around and have a higher profile than our size would suggest."
Hard-worldng
Buzink describes EFT as "a very positive hard-working company—I get on well with them". EFTs original motive for buying Fransens was dear: to get that all-important foothold in the UK market. But ultimately things worked out rather differently.
With the new millennium the growing imbalance of trade between the UK and the Continent was becoming more pronounced, with a knockon effect on UK-based international operators.