Volvo Financial Services sign string of deals despite credit crunch

In early October, fresh-produce
distributor Fowler Welch Coolchain signed a service-inclusive
contract-hire deal with Volvo Financial Services for the provision
of 10 articulated FH-480 trucks, with a further 30 to be delivered
in December.

The deal for the 44-tonne trucks was made through Volvo
dealership A Culpin and Son Ltd, based in Spalding, and the first
10 units have met operating cost targets already, according to Lee
Juniper, national operations director for Fowler Welch.

The company was also recently chosen to supply eight trucks to
Towens Group, the Weston-super-Mare-based company that operates in
the construction and waste sectors.

Towens, whose fleet already comprises 28 trucks provided by
Volvo, purchased six of the new vehicles, while the 2 FL
skiploaders will be under a three-year contract hire.

The company said it had selected Volvo because of its
“reliability”; the fact vehicles provided were Euro 5 compliant;
and the higher fuel economy compared with the trucks replaced. In
London, Volvo FS also won an order with DB Schenker, the provider
of integrated logistic services, to supply four trucks on a
three-year contract hire.

Volvo won this deal because it met a specific requirement about
space restriction. Schenker was looking for trucks to manoeuvre in
and out of the narrow streets around Covent Garden.

Volvo Truck and Bus Centre won the tender by proposing 12-tonne
FL trucks, bigger than the smaller trucks previously used for
delivery, but still able to deliver to retail outlets in some of
London’s most crowded and narrow streets.

In October, Volvo Trucks secured several deals in the UK,
despite being forced to downsize its commercial-vehicle
manufacturing capacity in Europe and cut around 1,400 jobs in
response to a falling demand for trucks.

The company has not been spared by the credit turmoil and
recently announced it had to cut 20 percent of its European staff.
It explained that the job cuts – 400 employees at the company’s
plant in Ghent, Belgium and a combined 980 in Gothenburg and Umea
in Sweden – were needed to “rebalance production capacity to more
normal
levels”.

However, the Swedish-headquartered company has been able to
secure several deals in the past weeks, signalling that its
business has slowed down, but not frozen.

Antonio Fabrizio