During the group’s Capital Markets Day, Helmut Schweighofer, chief executive of DSV’s road transport division, announced a major restructuring of the European network which, according to the German publication DVZ, should involve a 30% reduction in road terminals, equivalent to more than one hundred facilities. The network is expected to shrink from the current 400 sites to 280. Through this operation, the Danish multinational aims to eliminate redundancies created by the overlap between the DSV and DB Schenker networks, following Schenker’s incorporation into the Danish group on 30 April 2025, concentrate flows across a smaller number of hubs and increase load density on key routes. The result would be a road network handling more than 50,000 trucks every day and over 100 million shipments a year in more than 50 countries.
The rationalisation of the physical network is expected to be accompanied by an equally significant technological overhaul. DSV has announced plans to unify more than 25 separate IT systems, inherited from successive acquisitions including Schenker, into a single common platform. The company sees this step as essential to managing routing, pricing and capacity planning centrally across the entire European network.
DSV is also introducing artificial intelligence algorithms to increase the average fill rate of industrial vehicles. The system should improve the consolidation of parcels, routes and delivery windows, with the aim of reducing empty kilometres and the number of intermediate stops required. This is also one of the main levers for improving the road division’s operating margins: more freight per truck means fewer terminals to serve and lower unit costs.
The plan forms part of an integration process that has accelerated compared with the original timetable. At the beginning of 2026, DSV said it intended to complete the incorporation of DB Schenker by the end of the same year, bringing forward by about two years the previous forecast, which had set 2028 as the target horizon. The group estimates expected synergies of at least DKK 4 billion, about €536 million, in 2026 alone, with a target of DKK 9 billion, about €1.2 billion, in 2027.
