Finsterwalder made sure to be in the right place at the right time, a place which today boasts a booming industry. With 20 years of history behind it, the Allgäu-based company continues its success story in central Germany.

In the late 1930s, husband and wife entrepreneurs Eugen and Theresia Finsterwalder founded a transport company right in the middle of the Allgäu, a region better known for its brown cows and their wholesome milk. Initially, the Finsterwalders focussed on servicing the dairy business before increasingly working for customers from the chemical industry. That which initially came about only more or less on purpose, has since turned into the main mission of the Finsterwalder Transport und Logistik GmbH based in Türkheim. 

With subsidiaries in Marl and Halle (Saale), the company is present at the very hub of the chemical industry. Putting the company history in a nutshell, Klaus Finsterwalder, managing partner, explains: "Chemistry is our life and we follow our customers from that industry." In West Germany in the 1980s, this strategy quickly met its limits. The transport logistics market was tight, scarce logistics space in the agglomeration areas of the chemical industry thwarted its growth in the same way as its striking lack of skilled labour. 

After Germany's reunification, the family company − ready to invest − seized the opportunity of gaining a foothold in the new German federal states. Finsterwalder's existing business relationships with the chemical industry of the former GDR gave the company a competitive advantage in that unknown territory. The open-minded entrepreneur managed to gain further helpful information in the summer of 1989 as Finsterwalder began employing professional truck drivers who had fled the GDR via Hungary and had found their way to the Allgäu region. Finsterwalder’s motivation was to be ready to go the minute the wall came down and position the company in the very triangle between Buna, Leuna and Bitterfeld, where the large-scale industrial infrastructure of chemical combines offered sufficient potential for transport service providers. 

His plan paid off handsomely. On 5 October 1990 he registered a logistics company with a single employee in Halle. Company headquarters: someone's sitting room. Before long, and after a consolidation phase, he had engaged in a consistent acquisition plan and merged all of his newly acquired companies into one group under the umbrella of the Finsterwalder Transport und Logistik GmbH in 1994. Since then, the company has grown organically through existing and new customers. Wolf-Peter Peter, a trusted partner from the get-go, and Anton Galster, who moved to the East 19 years ago, today run the business which boasts 600 employees and 130,000 square meters of covered storage space. 

Looking back, this is what Finsterwalder believes was the recipe for their success: "True to the motto 'helping people help themselves' we did not interfere much back then, giving the smaller transport companies that we had acquired enough elbow-room to develop freely." He also explains: "Experienced teams with the relevant know-how and smooth processes are crucial." From the very beginning he was impressed with his new employees' high level of training. The labour supply on the market is comparatively large, since in Halle, which has an unemployment rate of 13.7 percent, Finsterwalder has five times as many qualified applicants as in Türkheim, where the unemployment rate is only 2.3 percent. But one percentage does not necessarily equal another percentage. Nominally the demand is higher in central Germany, because with the East German economic recovery, logistics demand is growing disproportionally – in the chemical industry, too. 

Today this particular industry still accounts for the lion's share of the company's turnover. For handling loose and liquid goods, Finsterwalder has opted for permanent partnerships. An example is a central German manufacturer of chemical precursors and basic chemicals for whom Finsterwalder, in a joint venture with a second transport logistics provider, takes on polypropylene directly ex production plant using a pneumatic conveyer conduit and subsequently manages internal transportation to the warehouse. From there on, Finsterwalder schedules and picks up the plastic as palletised or silo goods according to the order for customers throughout Europe. Apart from the chemical industry, Finsterwalder also provides its core competencies – transportation, storage and logistics – to manufacturers and traders of machinery, foods, foils, beverages, pet food and paper. Moreover, two-thirds of the company's workforce is employed in central Germany. 

And that is also the place where Finsterwalder set milestones for the overall group's success: In 1997 the company entered the cargo network CargoLine; in 2007 a transfer station directly at the Halle (Saale) freight railway station was put in operation. It offers roofed ramps, underslung cranes for up to 80 tonnes, several shunting locomotives for freight handling for block trains and single wagons as well as 2.5 km of railway networks. "Our early activities in central Germany have paid off," declares Finsterwalder. "We've managed to gain a strong foothold in the top ranks of the logistics hub over the past 20 years."