Trucking is the most popular method of transporting goods accounting for 66.5% of the total freight volume in Russia. Customers use trucking services because trucking is cheaper than air and rail transportation, and because of its flexibility, which enables freight delivery to any location.

The segments of the road transportation market include:

• Full Truck Load (FTL) services, where one consignment is carried on a whole truck;
• Less than Truck Load (LTL) services, where consignments from several sources are combined into one vehicle load;
• Groupage, where goods from several shippers are consolidated in a depot where they are sorted by destination and then shipped collectively with other goods with the same destination.

Significant share of all freight in Russia is trucked within the European part of the country. At the same time, there are long haul trucking routes within the Siberian Federal District, as well as within Far Eastern Federal District. As for the international districts, after sharp decline in Russia-EU shipments in 2014-2015, in 2016 the situation stabilised. Also, China has become a favourable destination for the Russian long-haul trucking market due to increasing freight turnover between Russia and China.

The trucking industry in Russia is very competitive with the ten largest FTL trucking companies controlling approximately 16% of the market. There are several key groups of market players operating in the Russian trucking market: large companies (operating over 300 trucks), medium companies (50-300 trucks), family-run companies and self-employed individuals (1-50 trucks), asset-light logistic companies, in-house logistic companies (servicing large retail chains) and firms specialising in transportation of certain types of products (e.g. cars).

Large-sized companies (such as Globaltruck) directly compete with medium-sized companies, asset-light logistic companies and in-house logistic companies.

One of the key trends in the long-haul market has been business consolidation. Increasing tax compliance, transparency requirements, as well as the introduction of automatic weight control, are additional factors affecting smaller trucking companies that are less equipped to efficiently manage compliance with evolving regulatory requirements.

The share of large companies with large truck fleets has been steadily growing, while small companies and self-employed individuals with trucks older than 5-7 years exit the market. This factor will lower the number of actively used long-haul trucks.

Sectorally the most developed, advanced and promising market segments are FTL-transportation for retailers, FMCG companies and e-commerce. Freight transport services are strongest in the FMCG segment, which demonstrates rapid growth, including in the regions of the Urals and Siberia. The value of the e-commerce market in Russia, according to AKIT, in 2019 grew by 23% compared to 2018 and amounted to 2,032 billion rubles.

There is significant tightening regulatory environment in recent years which benefits large and professional trucking companies.