18-19 November (in person)

A confidential, high-level strategic commercial dialogue across industry sectors and transport modes

in-person | Chatham House Rule | no recording | no media | no online participation | no sales pitches

Leaders’ real priorities?  Compliance or opportunity-driven?  Appropriate asset utilisation?  In Gothenburg, we focus on supporting leaders to understand the vision for tomorrow and ask if we should change how we think about balancing immediate operational demands and the proactive steps required for sustained corporate viability.  The issues that supply chain and logistics leaders & their teams are tackling today – from the impact of multiple separate yet interconnected global crises, to environmental degradation, to the future of Europe and of our own companies – are systemic.  Tackling these in isolation can lead to unintended consequences and/or simply shift the burden elsewhere.

Transition – fuel, but much more.  Everyone will also be able to drive a truck around Volvo’s challenging test track.

Q&A with Roger Alm President Volvo Trucks

Transformation

1. Do we envisage a “better” future in 2027, 2028 or 2030? What is The Plan?

1. Learning & impact of our current approaches to shape change [cargo owners, infrastructure & asset owners, energy supplier, financier & others]
2. Briefings: mega trends, costs / capacities / what is coming, what can we learn from global trading blocs, climate status [leaders, experts & academics]
3. No longer constrained by our own thinking: AI capabilities today for logistics & supply chain (helping you assess what you are doing well & what you are missing)
4. (Re)defining ‘resilience’ & participants’ OKM (one key message) – top priorities?    

“…this changes the core strategic question from “Should I gear up to move quickly or slowly?” to “Given that the precise timing of disruptive take-off can never be predicted, is it wiser to err on the side of potentially moving too soon or potentially moving too late?”

2. “Built to last”?  Playing the long game 

*Meeting a senior group of customers, partners, suppliers and others in the neutral and confidential setting that F&L and its community provides is a rare opportunity.  This session will likely take the form of parallel workshops & breakouts on a plethora of relevant topics; Sept-Oct 2026 – get in touch – we are making plans with confirmed participants)*.  Ideas include:

• A different way for everyone to view the new financial reality & how it impacts all KPIs [logistics leaders, financiers & academics]
• Innovations & technology including AI – an answer to long-lasting commercial trade-offs?
• Minimising impact from disruption, cost increases, capacity uncertainty, volatility and crisis while still taking proactive steps forward to secure our own future corporate viability
• The cost trap, strategic behaviours, forecasting, inventory, supplier relationships & contracts, asset users vs owners, fragmented visibility, “3 to tango”, conflicting KPIs ….  each decision in isolation makes sense, but what do they create together? [leaders]
• Speed of change on the road; your data & your opportunity – which model & what does it mean for how we work across the sector?
• Clean energy cross mode progress – linking, assessing, comparing and learning from others; transferable learning?

3. What next?  Actions agreed for and by those present

• Conclusion – what next?  Are tomorrow’s KPIs the same as today’s, or will external forces prove stronger and change our business models? What relationship should there be between different stakeholder groups?

19:30 – 22:30, Gothenburg

• Evening networking dinner programme, sponsor tbc

Morning – moving theory to practical realities

• Driving: in being able to drive a truck around Volvo’s challenging test track, leaders understand the practical realities of operationalising new technology including real-world performance, charging logistics, and driver experience requirements.
• Practical problem-solving: rotating around key issues that impact daily operations and resonate with all of us.  We close the knowledge gap where we only know what we know in our own area by looking end to end and understanding what happens in other modes.

Conclusions & lunch

14:00 first private airport bus to Gothenburg Landvetter

Afternoon – choice of visits to important industry sites

14:00 choice of visits TBC

16:00 airport bus to Gothenburg Landvetter

“I suddenly understood the problem, when I started talking to peers and leaders outside my industry and expertise”   

“What one sector hails as a “breakthrough” is often just standard practice from an industry that has been doing it for decades”

“What got our businesses here today will not get the results we are looking for tomorrow, but it’s not as simple as swapping diesel for an electric plug”

“Like compound interest or the Chinese bamboo tree, actions we take today change tomorrow…”

“If we re-perceive energy system transformations as a series of potentially fast, opportunity-rich, modest cost and demand-led tipping points of uncertain timing – rather than just a single, slow-moving, costly and supply-led ‘hard slog’ – then we might start getting somewhere”

This meeting is for senior business leaders & their teams; people who are actively leading industry today.  You are advised to register now because at F&L we build agendas to match the interests of those in the room; many F&L Member companies will be present.

Confirmed participants already include:

Cargill
DP World
Duisport
EY
Eraneos
Leica Biosystems
LKW Walter
Loadar
Logivity
Nike
Nimling
North Sea Port
OG Clean Fuels
Owens Corning / Paroc
P&G
Pioneer Point Partners
Port of Gothenburg
Port of Hamburg
Professor Alan McKinnon
Russell Group
Samskip
Seerefine
Stora Enso
Terberg Benschop
Toyota Material Handling Europe
Trimble
UIRR
Unit45
Volvo Trucks
Wärtsilä Marine
Zaragoza Logistics Center (ZLC)

Participants will be added in due course and, in the meantime, you can see who attended recent meetings below.

• Participant list for “Türkiye: Important Customer, Supplier & Partner“
• Participant list for “Priorities & Choices: stuck in Crisis Mode?” (Apr 2026)
• Participant list for F&L at Nike (Oct 2025)

We are hosted by Volvo Trucks in Gothenburg at their Volvo Trucks Experience Center
VTEX, VTDC, 423 52 Göteborg, Entrence via TLA-porten, Pressvägen 2

• Tues 17 Nov –  welcome dinner & industry visits (central Gothenburg)
• Wed 18 Nov –  F&L agenda 09:00 – 17:30 hosted by Volvo Trucks at their HQ in Gothenburg + evening dinner programme
• Thurs 19 Nov –  F&L agenda 09:00 – 13:00 hosted by Volvo Trucks at their HQ in Gothenburg and including practical ‘stations’ & driving trucks around Volvo’s test track

• Sleeping hotel – 17 & 18 Nov – Elite Plaza Hotel 4* in Gothenburg is centrally located at Västra Hamngatan 3, 411 17 Göteborg, Sweden.  15% discount details in the registration confirmation email.
• Welcome dinner 17 Nov – walking distance of Elite Plaza Hotel, location will be confirmed.
• Meeting venue – 18 & 19 Nov – Volvo Trucks Experience Center VTEX, VTDC, 423 52 Göteborg, Entrance via TLA-porten, Pressvägen 2.
• Networking dinner 18 Nov – location will be confirmed and transport will be included.
• Parking is available at both the hotel (below) & at Volvo but we will travel from the hotel to the meeting and both dinners together.

• General businesswear and any F&L members‘ products!
• Questions welcome – please get in touch.

… F&L was created in 1994 by shippers & logistics providers who realised that they could not tackle logistics issues alone in their companies, or within a commercial structure. They created a neutral, independent not-for-profit platform for senior logistics leaders and their teams to utilise cross-industry peer exchange to – judge today’s trade-offs – identify new opportunities for resilience and growth – catch blind spots – de-risk decision making – and determine facts, helping everyone build on real world experience to develop more practical, durable solutions and choose their own paths forward, together and separately.

Mission – to drive improved standards, learnings & the success of Members by leveraging the multi-stakeholder international community to spark knowledge sharing & tackle obstacles from every possible vantage point.

How is this achieved?  F&L is structured as a neutral (independent), not-for-profit, confidential, antitrust compliant Members’ forum and is registered in Belgium as an ASBL.  Multi-stakeholder membership is deliberately balanced to ensure a variety of perspectives across a host of variables.  F&L does not lobby but it does have strong relationships with policymakers and many other institutions and communities for its Members’ benefit.

Members are global / regional heads of logistics & supply chain, CEOs & senior management focused on freight logistics across the supply chain, asset owners, founders of critical solutions, all industry sectors and transport modes, based across Europe & globally (list).  Unlimited licences are provided for leaders to share the membership with colleagues (no charge).

“The important thing is to avoid the ‘narrow’ trap & the echo chamber”
“Access to informed external views & sheer breadth which it is not possible to organise by yourself”
“Where else can you ask questions openly and listen to others doing the same?”
“Learn, benchmark & challenge”
“We make better, more informed, more robust decisions”