The German transport group Lit has boosted its activities in Italy with the acquisition of the Trentino company Autotrasporti Pedot. The news was announced on June 5, 2024, but the transaction is effective from January 1. Operationally, there should be no significant changes, as the Trentino company will continue to operate under its name, led by current CEO Stefano Pedot. This acquisition, explains Klaas Lang, head of business development at Lit, allows customers of both companies to receive road transport services in Germany, Italy, and the Benelux from a single provider. Furthermore, Lit also operates in the intermodal sector.
In August 2023, Lit announced the acquisition of the fellow German company Gübau, retroactively effective from January, bringing three companies into the fold: Gübau Logistics, Gübau Service, and Vetra Spedition, which specialize in the automotive and chemical sectors. Gübau, which has a fleet of forty industrial vehicles and employs 150 people, maintains its autonomy under the leadership of Martin Möhrmann. Besides its headquarters in Wolfsburg, it has branches in Baden-Baden and Velbert.
Lit owner Fokke Fels confirms that the group "is in an expansion phase," and the numbers support this: revenue rose from 391 million euros in 2018 to 835 million in 2023, aiming to exceed 900 million this year and reach a billion by 2025. This success is based on a strategic shift implemented in 2008 during the global financial crisis when the company decided to diversify its activities, which were previously closely tied to the automotive industry. Today, their principle is that no client should account for more than 5% of the revenue.
Another growth driver has been acquisitions: besides the aforementioned, Lit has integrated Kieserling, Hölkemeier, Westfalia, and part of the Würfel group, Fehrenkötter. Notably, Fels emphasizes, the acquisition of Kieserling in 2018 "laid the foundation for our entry into contract logistics and the air and sea transport sector." Since 2019, Kieserling Contract & Logistics has been working on the last mile for Amazon in northern Germany.
Today, the Lit Group employs about four thousand people, and Fels believes they can still make three or four acquisitions a year in transportation and third-party logistics. The group chooses companies with their own fleets, and once the acquisition is complete, it allows the acquired companies to operate independently. For storage, Lit has 950,000 square meters of warehouses, 45,000 of which were recently built in Minden. The subsidiary Automotive Solutions serves automotive logistics.
In air and sea shipments, Lit founded a company in Singapore in 2023 to manage foreign warehouses and opened branches in Istanbul and Shenzhen. Additionally, it has made investments in Bangalore (India), the United States, Vietnam, and Mexico. The group also performs intermodal transports through the joint venture Smartrail Logistics with Captrain Deutschland. Despite its size, Fels states that "we are not perceived as a group, but rather as what we are: a large medium-sized company. And I am firmly convinced that the medium-sized company is appreciated by many clients also for its personal approach."
