Who owns the Dutch 3PL market
Dutch logistics has revenue rankings, membership lists and property reports. What it does not have is an overview of the question that matters most in practice: who is the owner. Which company is still family-held, which one has a fund on board, and which one has long been run from Bonn, Marseille or Tokyo.
This is that overview. 126 logistics service providers that matter in the Netherlands, ordered by scale, with the shareholders by name, the type of ownership, the revenue and capacity class, headcount, warehouse space, international footprint and recent transactions. Hauliers that happen to own a shed are only included where they demonstrably run contract logistics for third parties. After that comes the movement underneath: 271 acquisitions since 2018, and six scenarios for where this is heading.
How ownership is distributed
Click a category to filter the registerThe top bar counts companies, the bottom one weighs them by revenue. That difference is the heart of the story: private equity owns many companies and little revenue, while a handful of listed groups carry almost a third of the turnover. The revenue bar covers the 77 companies that publish a revenue figure.
The market by scale
Every rectangle is a company, the area is its revenueNine years of consolidation
271 acquisitions between January 2018 and August 2026, each with a sourceFund-backed platform is a derived category. Besides deals where a fund buys directly, it also counts acquisitions by platforms with a fund behind them: Logicall, QLS, Lineage, One Frio, Duvenbeck and Staci. Without that correction private equity would be all but invisible here, because the trade press reports such a platform acquisition as an ordinary corporate deal.
The serial buyers are not at the top of the market but in the middle of it. AB Texel, St. van den Brink, Van Straalen De Vries and Sluyter build scale through small acquisitions, while the largest players in the Netherlands barely buy here because they already got in through a corporate takeover abroad.
The deal register
Search by buyer, target or year; every line links to its sourceWhat the register shows
The top of the market is almost entirely foreign
Of the ten largest contract logistics providers in the Netherlands, not one is in Dutch hands. DHL, GXO, CEVA, DSV, Kuehne+Nagel, ID Logistics, Rhenus, Arvato, Mainfreight and Lineage are run from Bonn, Greenwich, Marseille, Hedehusene, Schindellegi, Cavaillon, Holzwickede, Gütersloh, Auckland and Novi, Michigan.
The highest independently Dutch entries are Neele-Vat (seventh in the Top 100 LDV 2026, its first year in the top ten) and Bleckmann at fifth, although the latter has been 75 percent Turkish-owned through Netlog Logistics Group since 2014.
Private equity is thin on the ground, and it is almost always Waterland
The Dutch 3PL market is strikingly short of financial sponsors. In the acquisition register below, 21 of 271 reported transactions since 2018 are fund-driven, and that already counts what platforms with a fund behind them bought. The overwhelming majority of consolidation is done by strategic buyers.
Waterland is the only player with a real logistics portfolio: Logicall (the platform around Janssen and VCK, with Mondial and Drake & Farrell inside it), QLS, Rotom, RVE, Duvenbeck and, through Duvenbeck, Schotpoort. Alongside that sit infrastructure funds in cold chain: EQT behind Constellation, Aermont and Orchard behind One Frio, Bay Grove behind Lineage, Westport behind NewCold.
The family business is the norm, and succession is running
Logistiek.nl found for its 2026 Top 100 that more than half of the participants are led or financially controlled by a family member of the founder. This register confirms it: from Ewals (fourth generation) and Koopman (fourth) to Claassen (sixth) and Van Duuren (five generations).
The owners are old. Wolter Koops is 83 in the 2025 Quote 500. At Jan de Rijk the generational handover formally started in 2024 at the British subsidiary. Kivits let two non-family members buy in during 2024. Vos Logistics, Vos Transport, Bakker Logistiek, Kramer and Schotpoort all exited within five years.
The real consolidation wave runs through strategics, not funds
DSV bought DB Schenker for about EUR 14.3 billion and merged the Dutch organisations on 1 December 2025. Ewals took over Vos Transport (completed August 2026, roughly EUR 850 million combined). Jacky Perrenot bought Vos Logistics. STEF swallowed Bakker Logistiek. DACHSER took Müller Fresh Food Logistics.
Underneath runs a second layer of serial buyers in the mid-market: AB Texel has nine reported acquisitions since 2018 in this register, St. van den Brink seven, Van Straalen De Vries six, and Vos Logistics, Cornelissen, Neele-Vat, E. van Wijk and Sluyter four each. Of all 271 reported acquisitions, 31 percent came from a foreign buyer.
Cold chain is the most consolidated corner of the market
Dutch public cold storage has moved almost entirely into the hands of four international platforms in ten years: Lineage (Kloosterboer, Daalimpex, Partner Logistics, Frigocare, Van Tuyl, H&S Coldstores; eighteen to nineteen sites), Americold (through AGRO Merchants, about 112,000 to 121,600 pallet positions), Constellation under EQT (129,000 pallet positions) and Nichirei through Thermotraffic, Eurofrigo and Hiwa.
What remains independent at scale is small and countable: Blankendaal (about 125,000 pallet positions), Frigo Group, Sealane, eColdstore and whatever One Frio has not yet bought since March 2025.
E-fulfilment has almost no independent scale left
None of the largest Dutch e-fulfilment providers is still free. Monta went to DHL in 2022, Active Ants fully to bpost (now bnode, brand Paxon), DynaGroup has had the same owner since 2017, Mondial and Drake & Farrell sit inside Waterland's Logicall, QLS has Waterland on board, and Fulfilment.nl went to the British fulfilmentcrowd in May 2026.
Bleckmann is the exception in size, and that is a Turkish majority. What is left of independent e-fulfilment is SME: hundreds of companies below EUR 30 million in revenue that appear in no ranking at all.
Who owns the revenue is not who owns the companies
Counted in companies, private equity holds 11 of 126. Weighted by revenue it is about 1 percent. The reverse holds for listed groups: only 29 of the 126 names, but nearly a third of the ranked revenue.
The largest category is still the family business, at roughly half of the revenue, and almost sixty percent of that sits in Dutch hands. The single largest family stake is foreign though: Klaus-Michael Kühne on his own outweighs Neele-Vat, Ewals or Den Hartogh.
Dutch logistics is far more international than its reputation
Of the 126 companies, 92 operate their own sites outside the Netherlands, and that is not only the multinationals. Mid-market Dutch providers run their own operations in Romania, Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Hungary and Serbia, usually driven by driver costs and by following a customer eastwards.
Only 26 companies here are demonstrably Netherlands-only. Those are mostly regional hauliers with warehousing, cold stores and the smaller e-fulfilment providers. Use the footprint filter above the register to see them.
Where this is heading
Six scenarios for 2026 to 20311. The sell-off continues
The base case. The engine is demography, not the business cycle. Around 99 percent of the sector consists of family businesses, 63 percent of owners want to hand over within ten years, and only one in five has a family member lined up. At an average of 4.2 times EBITDA, selling to a strategic buyer is more attractive for many owners than another investment round in equipment, electrification and software.
In this register the deal flow rises from 18 reported acquisitions in 2018 to 45 in 2024. Nothing in the underlying drivers points to a reversal.
More than 35 reported acquisitions a year, a foreign share holding above 30 percent, and serial buyers such as AB Texel, St. van den Brink, Sluyter and Neele-Vat carrying on.
2. The funds come back, or they do not
Waterland moved into Janssen, now Logicall, and into Duvenbeck in 2022, and into QLS in 2024. On a normal five to seven year hold, the exit window falls between 2027 and 2030. Logicall turned over EUR 384 million in 2024 with a net loss in the order of EUR 10 million. What that platform fetches will decide whether other funds start to see Dutch logistics as investable.
Today private equity is 11 of the 126 companies in this register and about 1 percent of the ranked revenue. That is a low base, and therefore a large lever in both directions.
A sale process around Logicall or QLS, a second Dutch fund platform in warehousing, or multiples breaking out of the 3.9 to 4.7 band.
3. Existing square metres become the scarce good
On paper the property market is loosening: vacancy rose to 6.3 percent and take-up halved from 4.9 million m2 in 2021 to about 1.5 million m2 now. At the same time new construction is blocked by grid congestion, worth eighteen months of extra lead time, nitrogen rules for another twelve, and provincial policy against large distribution boxes. In Noord-Brabant anything from three hectares upwards is banned outside designated locations and seven provinces are applying the brakes.
Existing, grid-connected property in prime locations then becomes worth more than the vacancy figures suggest, and the gap widens between Tilburg-Waalwijk at 3.0 percent expected vacancy and Lelystad at 5.4 percent.
Rents rising in Tilburg-Waalwijk and Eindhoven while Flevoland and Rotterdam fall, which is already happening in the BCI series, and 3PLs subletting space instead of building.
4. The labour shock
The hardest ceiling is people. There are 14,000 to 16,000 vacancies open, 44 percent of operators name staff shortages as the biggest constraint on running the business, and about 40 percent of the 1.7 million migrant workers in the Netherlands work in logistics. BCI calculated that restricting labour migration would cut demand for logistics property by 9 percent, roughly 450,000 m2.
In that scenario the advantage shifts abruptly to whoever deploys capital instead of hands: NewCold, Active Ants, QLS, Bleckmann and the automated cold stores. Labour-intensive fulfilment below EUR 30 million in revenue runs into trouble first.
Political decisions on labour migration, an acceleration in AutoStore and robotics investment, and manual fulfilment providers selling or folding.
5. Two shocks already under way
Integrating DB Schenker into DSV cost EUR 14.8 billion plus EUR 1.5 billion in integration costs, cut more than 7,000 jobs worldwide, and was only completed in the Netherlands on 1 December 2025. In July 2026 DSV was still struggling with precisely the Dutch, German and French parts. Every difficult integration shakes contracts loose, and those contracts land somewhere else.
The second shock is fiscal. Since 1 July 2026 a EUR 3 customs charge applies to every consignment below EUR 150 and the exemption is gone. That pushes Chinese platforms from direct shipping towards stock-holding fulfilment in Europe, which is exactly the demand Dutch warehousing lives on.
Tenders from shippers that used to sit with Schenker, and Asian tenants in new leases; at CTP that was already about 20 percent of new lettings within eighteen months.
6. The scenario where little happens
The other side, and it is serious. At 4.2 times EBITDA and falling margins the proceeds disappoint many owners, and whoever has no urgent reason waits. In this register reported acquisitions already fell from 45 to 38 in 2025, and 2026 is on course for something similar after eight months.
The distance-based truck levy of 18 cents per kilometre and labour costs rising 6.1 percent in 2026 press down on precisely the EBITDA the multiple is applied to. Delay then reinforces itself, the market stays fragmented, and consolidation shifts from acquisitions to insolvencies. The insolvency rate in transport and storage tripled in a year to 39.2 per 100,000 and is the highest of any sector.
Deal counts falling two years running, a further rise in the insolvency rate, and multiples dropping below 3.9.
About these numbers
A few things worth knowing before you start calculating with any of this.
The ranking is indicative. No public source gives the Dutch revenue of contract logistics providers. The scale classes come from the submissions to the Top 100 Logistiek Dienstverleners by Logistiek.nl and Buck Consultants International, supplemented with revenue that companies publish themselves. There is a trap in that Top 100 though: the submissions mix group figures with Dutch figures. Bleckmann sits in the EUR 200 to 300 million band while the group turns over about EUR 730 million, and Neele-Vat sits in the EUR 500 to 1,000 million band while its own site says EUR 250 million. Read the class as an order of magnitude, not as an annual figure.
Headcount and warehouse space are as published. Each figure carries its scope, either the Dutch organisation or the whole group, because a Dutch subsidiary of a global network rarely publishes its own numbers. Where only pallet positions are published, that is what is shown. Sorting by headcount or by warehouse space therefore mixes scopes, which is why the scope is always visible on the card.
International footprint means own sites. A company counts as international only where it operates its own locations abroad. Agent networks, partner networks and franchise arrangements do not count, which is why several forwarders that serve the whole world appear here as Netherlands-only.
The treemap does not show the whole market. The area is the midpoint of the published revenue band, and only the 77 companies that took part in the Top 100 have such a band. The cold chain platforms and the port operators are therefore missing there, while they are present in the register.
The acquisition register is not a census. It is built from the acquisition overview of Logistiek.nl, Warehouse Totaal, Transport Online, Nieuwsblad Transport and decisions by the Dutch competition authority ACM, and every line carries a source link. Where a source did not name the buyer or the target, the line was dropped rather than filled in. The category fund-backed platform is derived and does not appear as such in the sources.
Ownership is hard to establish in the Netherlands. Shareholdings are not public, the ultimate beneficial owner register is shielded, and shareholder information in the trade register sits behind paid services. That is why every company carries a source confidence label. High means two independent sources or a primary one such as an annual report or an ACM decision. Medium means a single source, or a name without percentages. Low means the company calls itself a family business but not one shareholder could be established by name. That last group can be resolved with one trade register extract per company, not with more searching.
Two things that circulate in the corridors are deliberately not stated here as fact: that Rietveld Logistics Group was formerly called OMS Op- en Overslag, and that the De Werk family holds shares in Steinweg. Neither could be confirmed.
Main sources: Logistiek.nl, Warehouse Totaal, Nieuwsblad Transport, Transport Online, ABN AMRO Sector Advisory, BCI Global, CBS, UWV, Savills, Dealsuite, and the annual reports, press releases and ACM decisions of the companies themselves. Updated September 2026.
