Girteka shifts freight operations into Latvia and Romania

Girteka is shifting part of its European road-freight operation into Latvia and Romania, creating locally registered fleets and operating teams as the company adjusts its network to the continuing shortage of professional drivers. The new entities in Riga and Oradea will combine vehicle registration, driver employment, transport management, and local administrative support rather than functioning solely as recruitment offices.

The Latvian operation is already approaching 100 locally registered trucks, with vehicles working in the network, while the Romanian business is preparing to receive its first trucks and drivers. Both will remain integrated with Girteka’s wider European transport operation, allowing capacity to be allocated across customer flows while employment and fleet administration are handled locally.

The restructuring addresses a basic constraint in asset-based road freight: a truck only produces transport capacity when a qualified driver is available to operate it. Expanding vehicle fleets without solving recruitment can therefore leave capital tied up in underused equipment, particularly in long-haul transport where working patterns and time away from home make driver retention difficult.

Girteka is concentrating the additional capacity on the parts of its business where service consistency is particularly important, including temperature-controlled and high-value freight. Those operations give transport planners less room to absorb missed departures or unpredictable capacity because product condition, security, and scheduled collection or delivery windows can be central to the customer contract.

Moving part of the operating structure to Latvia and Romania gives the company access to additional labour markets without requiring the new fleets to work only within those countries. Vehicles and drivers can still form part of a wider European network, while local entities handle the employment and administrative structures required to support them.

The model is not entirely new for Girteka. The company has already built a sizeable operating structure in Poland and is extending the principle into additional markets as driver availability becomes a more persistent planning issue. The difference now is the scale of the labour constraint across the wider European road-transport sector.

The International Road Transport Union’s latest global shortage analysis found around 2.9 million unfilled truck-driving positions across 18 surveyed markets, equivalent to roughly 11% of the relevant workforce. Europe alone has around 502,000 unfilled positions, representing a shortage rate of approximately 13%.

Demographics make that problem harder to treat as another freight-market cycle. Around 20% of Europe’s current driver workforce is expected to retire within five years, while 65% of surveyed European operators identify the driver shortage as their most pressing concern. The gap has remained substantial even as freight demand has softened, suggesting that recruitment capacity has become structurally detached from short-term transport volumes.

For large carriers, that changes how fleet planning is approached. Vehicle procurement, maintenance capacity, depot locations, and customer contracts all depend on assumptions about driver availability. A company that can recruit across several labour markets has more options when one country becomes difficult, although each new operating entity adds its own regulatory, payroll, fleet-registration, and management requirements.

That makes Girteka’s choice to establish complete local operations more significant than simply recruiting drivers abroad. Transport managers and administrative teams are being developed alongside the fleets, giving the company the local structure needed to supervise vehicles while keeping them integrated with central planning.

The approach will still have to prove that recruitment translates into usable capacity. Drivers need to be retained as well as hired, and the attraction of one labour market can change as wages, regulations, and competing employment opportunities move. Additional operating bases also create complexity if planning, vehicle maintenance, and management systems become fragmented.

For customers, however, the location of the legal entity matters far less than whether contracted trucks arrive when required. Temperature-controlled and high-value supply chains are particularly sensitive to a carrier reducing capacity at short notice, making a broader employment base potentially valuable if it makes fleet availability more predictable.

Girteka’s Latvian fleet provides the first measurable indication of progress, with the operation approaching 100 locally registered trucks. Romania is at an earlier stage, so the pace at which vehicles and drivers enter service there will show whether the same model can be repeated effectively.

The wider European shortage will not be solved by moving fleets between countries; the underlying demographic and recruitment problem remains. Girteka is instead changing the geography of its own operating model so that one constrained labour market does not determine how much equipment the company can keep productive. In an industry where unused tractors quickly become expensive pieces of parked capital, that is a practical rather than cosmetic response to the driver gap.