Fleet Europe Forum - Panel Discussion on fleet trends and challenges
A lively panel discussion at the Fleet Europe Forum brought together opinions from all sides of the industry. Starting with the question of long terms client supplier partnerships, Martin Jahn, Managing Director of Volkswagen Group Fleet Division, spoke of the need for a mutual understanding of goals and missions.
From the leasing side, Richard Sikkel, Senior Vice President at Athlon, said that everything started with great service.
Fred Turco, representing fleet owners (Pfizer) emphasised the need for access to all information. Commenting on the likelihood of further consolidation within the leasing industry, Richard Sikkel went on to say that he believed the small specialist companies would survive, as would the major international concerns, but those left in the middle ground were likely to disappear.
Norbert van den Eijnden of Alphabet also expected to see only 4 major international leasing companies left in the future. Paul Herremans who runs the Philips fleet, agreed that the mid-sized players seemed to struggle with very large fleets such as his. Speaking of lessons learned since the economic crisis, Steve Newton of remarketing specialist Autorola said that little seemed to have changed.
The market appeared to be self-regulating. Answering a question on the emergence of smart mobility, Fred Turco of Pfizer pointed out that the ‘new’ notion of TCO just a decade or so ago, was now systematic, and that the same was sure to happen with new mobility concepts.
The panel all agreed that electric vehicles were on the way, but were not able to go into any detail. Martin Jahn said that everybody says the market share for EV’s will be 20% or so in 2020, but no-one can tell you how many EV’s are going to be sold next year!
The session finished by moderator Steven Schoefs asking what the next big thing would be in fleet. Steve Newton: "getting the best possible value from residual values by going where the demand is". Norbert van den Eijnden: "bringing much more flexibility into fleet". Richard Sikkel said that Corporate Social Responsibility would become much more of an issue, while Martin Jahn pointed to more car sharing in the fleet world. Paul Herremans spoke of finding multi-modal solutions that really work. Fred Turco emphasised more risk management and increased added value for companies.
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