History
For more than a century, GEODIS has been providing best-in-class transportation and logistics to help our clients deliver more. We're a forward-looking logistics provider, using our experience and expertise to innovate and meet our clients' current and future needs.
The GEODIS Group continuously delivers relevant, reliable responses to the logistics challenges of today and tomorrow.
International growth
In 1904, Emile Calberson founded a rail freight company in Le Havre, shipping goods to Rouen and Paris. At the time, its business was transporting luggage and parcels by passenger train, and then delivering them from the train station to the end customer. In 1920, the company shifted its focus to road transport and changed its name to Société des Transports Routiers Calberson (Calberson Road Transport Company). It went on to expand throughout France, becoming the top French express shipping company. The business was taken over by SCETA, a subsidiary of SNCF (France’s public railway company), in 1961.
International expansion of the network
In the early 1950s, Calberson began marketing its services in North Africa. Starting in 1970, Calberson opened new offices in the Netherlands, Great Britain, Italy and Germany. In 1984, the company went public on the Paris Stock Exchange’s unlisted securities market. Toward the end of 1995, a merger with other SCETA Group subsidiaries gave rise to Compagnie Générale Calberson (Calberson General Company), doing business as Geodis. After being privatized in 1996, the Geodis Group reorganized into four business branches: Express, Road, Logistics, and Overseas.
With the 2006 acquisition of TNT Freight Management (renamed GEODIS Wilson), the Group strengthened its position in Scandinavia, the Americas, Asia, and Australia. By doing so, it became one of Europe’s premier freight forwarding operators. In 2008, the Group acquired IBM’s worldwide logistics monitoring platform, which resulted in Geodis’s fifth line of business, Supply Chain Optimization. That same year, Geodis became a wholly owned subsidiary of SNCF.
In 2009, Geodis continued to pursue its external growth plans with the acquisition of two of the four divisions of Giraud International: its steel division and its Central and Eastern European zone.
Strategic acquisitions to strengthen our business lines
In 2015, the Group brought all its brands together under the GEODIS brand name.
That same year, it acquired OHL (Ozburn-Hessey Logistics), headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, USA. At the time, OHL had a staff of more than 10,000 employees and 120 distribution centers that provided multiple supply chain management services to clients in North America.
In 2021, Geodis reinforced its presence in Europe by acquiring the hauler Pekaes in Poland, along with the companies Gandon and Perrier in France, to consolidate its road network across the continent. In 2022, GEODIS acquired the Singapore-based contract logistics specialist Keppel, followed by Need It Now Delivers, the US leader in express distribution. These two strategic acquisitions bolstered our ambitions as a global logistics provider capable of offering a comprehensive portfolio of services to our clients.
In 2023, the Group significantly strengthened its operations in a core country, Germany, when it acquired trans-o-flex, the leader in the express delivery of pharmaceutical products and other temperature-controlled goods.