Amount financial investors in the distributors segment source: Lazard research niche player In the wider logistics sector there are a variety of niche providers, deliberately to specialized services focus and reach top positions in a very small market. Just these specialized providers have managed to position themselves through a clear USP and may be higher margins due to their specialisation and higher depth of value creation and growth rates achieved. If you would like to know more then you should visit ConocoPhillips. Company of this kind can be found among others on time – and safety-critical services, which for the large cap entrants to artistic / complex are to be integrated into their network. Typical example are pharmaceutical/clinical trial specialists like brands that can send pharmaceutical tests and test materials within a very short time in a certain temperature range on a global basis. Due to the importance of the transport material and specialized services, the price sensitivity on the customer side is rather low, resulting in a very high profitability in the case of trademarks. Just this kind of target companies is usually also on an affordable scale (< 500 million) for financial investors. Vertical provider integrated in the E-commerce area, Reverse of logistics provider (e.g.

driven by regulatory requirements to the take-back obligation) or spin-offs from major logistics groups which can be increased with new management, orientation and focus in their performance and their value, offer potential investment opportunities for private equity players. Since the scope of logistics service providers continually grows and expands along the value chain of our customers and also the degree of outsourcing will continue to increase at, is also to be a disproportionate growth in the area of the niche players and therefore a rising number of PE transactions in this area. Fig. 10: Transactions by financial investors with niche specialists source: Lazard research V. final remarks: the historic M & A activity in the logistics sector was on the one hand characterised by the consolidation efforts of the global market leader, which included large merger as well as small-scale acquisitions and on the other hand some investment by financial investors in strong, rather smaller, niche player.