French Transport Market with Spot Price Surge: Capacity Squeeze Drives 20% Increase

Market Monday - Week 28 - Assessing transport data in France

In recent weeks the French road transportation market experienced almost record-high spot prices, reaching 2022 levels. This marks an interesting trend and prompts questions about the underlying causes. June 2025 showed several weeks with +20% increase in spot rates compared to June 2024, a remarkable uptick without an external shock or prominent underlying factor. In this post, I delve into potential reasons for the price shock and outline influencing factors.

Background on key market indicators

Spot prices are heavily influenced by the market forces of demand and capacity. When demand increases, the market typically experiences reduced capacity and increased inefficiencies. This dynamic is reflected in two key indicators: a persistent increase in contracted load rejections (transports either timed out or rejected by carriers on the Transporeon platform) and a slight decrease in the number of offers per load on the spot market. The first metric indicates that necessarily more loads are being shifted to the spot market. The second provides insight into market competition, reinforcing the basic theory that more offers lead to lower prices, and fewer offers lead to higher prices.

For better visualization and alignment of the development of contracted load rejections index with the spot offers index, rejections are displayed inverted in the graph. Therefore, the decreases in this graph for rejections and spot offers both indicate lower capacity and correlate with the price increases.

This chart highlights the divergence of capacity indicators (rejections and offers) from the spot price development, showcasing a perfect and usual market reaction during capacity tightness. With both capacity indicators significantly declined and inverted rejections persistently south of previous years’ values, we almost certainly understand a capacity squeeze as the reason for this spot market rate surge in France.

But what causes this surge and what do we need to expect for the coming weeks?

Are purely demand increases responsible for this market reaction? I have my doubts, although general market indicators such as the manufacturing PMI (Purchasing Manager Index) and recent GDP forecast adjustments indeed show a more favorable business sentiment compared to 2024. But the spot price lift experienced in France compares more to typical external shock reactions rather than a gentle market recovery.

I believe we can ignore the external shock theory, as neither tariffs nor the Middle East escalation-derived effects would lead to such a domestic market movement. The available capacity decreased because of rising supply chain inefficiencies due to increased wait times at docks, traffic jams, border crossing points, and of course, local fleet reductions and lower service provisions from international fleet providers.

While neither of the mentioned influencing factors is significantly disrupting the market alone, the joint combination of all these capacity impacting factors results in an external shock like spot price perception. Considering this situation and seasonal trends, I anticipate spot prices to remain elevated over the next few weeks, likely 8% to 10% higher than 2024 levels.

Christian Dolderer
Lead Research Analyst
Trimble Transportation (Transporeon)