In the driver's seat

In October, Swedish company Scania won a prestigious tender to supply 125 low-floor city buses for the city of Paris. The vehicles will be delivered in 2006 and 2007. The contract with the French capital leaves an option for acquiring 175 further units.

What Parisians might not know is that the flood of new buses soon to roll onto the Champs Elysées will be manufactured in the northern Polish city of Słupsk, where the Swedish automobile giant has its European center for bus production.

Swedish bus producers Scania and Volvo are helping to fuel a boom in the fast growing Polish bus-manufacturing market. Last year the 2,547 buses produced in Poland made the country the sixth largest bus producer in Europe. This largely comes down to the fact that large international producers have decided to shift their production to Poland. According to statistics provided by JMK - a company specializing in analyzing the bus market - after three quarters of 2005 the bulk of the buses manufactured in Poland were made by foreign investors.

"Five factories owned by foreign companies produced over 60 percent of all buses manufactured in Poland," writes bus market analyst at JMK Aleksander Kierecki. The Swedish companies - Volvo and Scania - together make up the largest slice of this pie. Together they produced 621 buses in the first nine months of this year, which amounted to 35.91 percent of the market. The Swedes' position is even more impressive when looking at export figures, as the number of buses sold abroad by Volvo and Scania in Poland amounted to around 49 percent of all Polish bus exports. Volvo Polska has overtaken MAN and is now the market leader in the number of buses produced.

Road trip

According to JMK, after the third quarter of 2005 Volvo had produced 424 units. Almost the whole of its production is sent to clients abroad, making the company the top bus-exporter in Poland. In Wrocław, the company boasts the largest and most modern bus factory in Europe. A complete range of low-floor buses: the city Volvo 7700, the inter-city Volvo 8700 and Volvo 8700LE, as well as Volvo 9700 coaches, are manufactured at the plant.

According to the president of Volvo Polska Centrum Przemysłowe, Roberto Teixeira, as much as 93 percent of the company's buses are sent abroad. He says that buses from his factory can be found in most European countries.

Teixeira also explained that the main reasons for locating its primary bus factory in Lower Silesia were the highly qualified and well-educated staff, as well as the city's location in Central Europe, putting both Western and Eastern markets within easy logistical reach.

Driving force

Volvo will invest a further zł.24.85 million in expanding the Wrocław plant and setting up a second production line. The investment will create around 800 new jobs in the city, where Volvo already employs around 1,800 people. Aside from the highly-skilled employees at the bus manufacturing center, many are employed in its services and accounting centers, as well as in its truck-production plant.

The date of the completion of the investment is still unknown. The president was enigmatic when it came to the expected production numbers. "This is a long-term investment, the increase in production will depend on the situation in the market," Teixeira said. However, he added that the company will continue to produce the same models it does now. 

Scania's factory in Słupsk was established in 1993 and initially both trucks and buses were produced there. However, in 2002, the rapidly growing market for Polish-produced buses prompted Scania to switch production solely to buses, and Słupsk became Scania's European center for city-bus production. As is the case with Volvo, Scania's vehicles are also mainly exported. Out of the 197 buses Scania produced after three quarters of 2005 (making the company the fourth-largest producer in the country), 187 were sent abroad.

"Considering the consistency of production, one can assume that the Swedish concern's factory in Słupsk will export as many units as last year, that is 251 units," Kierecki wrote. The main destinations for vehicles produced by the plant are the Scandinavian countries, the United Kingdom, France and Italy.

But while focusing on supplying buses for European cities, the company hasn't forgotten about the domestic market. In Q1 this year the plant delivered 10 city buses for the city to Olsztyn.