Group overview

Mainland Europe

Mainland Europe is Arriva’s long-term growth engine. The total passenger transport market for the EU27 countries is believed to exceed €200 billion in annual revenue. Historically, surface transport services in most of Europe have been delivered predominantly by the public sector and the industry is in the early stages of a major transformation towards private-sector delivery. Against this backdrop we are confident of meeting our medium-term objective of doubling mainland Europe revenue from 2006 levels by 2011.

A decade of building Arriva’s presence, extending to towns and cities in nine mainland European countries, has established an invaluable network of contacts and relationships, a rich portfolio of depots and businesses, and above all a depth of market understanding and knowledge that simply cannot be replicated easily or quickly.

In some countries we are amongst the market leaders, in others we are growing from a small base. We always enter a national market with the aim of becoming one of the leading operators in that country, when conditions are right.

Many of the organisations that have become part of Arriva have long histories of their own. Arriva frequently spends months or years developing relationships and dialogues with such organisations, building their confidence and comfort with the benefits of becoming part of a larger whole.

A firm plank of our mainland European strategy is to have every business headed by a management team drawn from the community it serves with access to a wider pool of opportunities than they could realise on their own - for investing in their business, for sharing and developing innovation and best practice, and for seeing their best ideas influence their fellow Arriva managers across the rest of the business.