World Business: Across the Ocean by Truck

More than 3,000 U.S. companies now do business in Europe, and their number is steadily increasing. So are their trucking needs, which up to now have been served only by European firms. Last week a U.S. firm took a logical step: it established the first American-owned trucking network in Europe.

Denver’s DC (for Denver-Chicago) Trucking Co., Inc., the nation’s seventh largest line (1964 revenues: $50 million), paid $2,000,000 to acquire an 85% interest in Amsterdam’s West Friesland Eurotransport, Inc. Though West Friesland’s business came to a modest $3,500,000 last year, the company operates in ten countries, far more than any other European line, and thus offers DC an ideal base for expansion. Italy’s Fiat has agreed to take the remaining 15% interest as “a calling card that we are leaving with a prospective new customer for our trucks.”

National rivalries, language barriers, monetary exchange difficulties and widely varying, virtually unregulated rates have helped to put European truckers years behind their U.S. counterparts. DC plans to win the business of U.S. firms on the Continent, and of European concerns as well, by providing rapid, door-to-door service within Europe and between the U.S. and Europe. To accomplish the latter, it has negotiated transatlantic cargo tie-ups with Seaboard World Airlines, Inc., Pan Am and McLean Industries, which operates a fleet of huge, specially designed piggyback freighters. DC began talking with dozens of potential American clients even before the West Friesland deal went through, got some swift results. “The European Du Pont operation had recently canceled its contract with West Friesland,” says DC’s London-born president, Leslie G. Taylor. “We turned that contract back on in five minutes.”

That is about the pace at which DC has been moving since Taylor, 49, bought a majority of the stock in 1963. So far, he has made four major domestic acquisitions, quadrupled the line’s income. After a short fishing trip to the Caribbean (his first vacation in two years), Taylor will fly to Amsterdam to get the new European venture rolling. Already on his agenda: plans to expand the ten-country network by adding Portugal and Spain in the near future, later extending service to a number of countries behind the Iron Curtain.