THE IMPACT OF CLUSTERING ON TRANSPORT COM-PANIES

The clustering of firms in the supply chain is rooted in the paradigm of the benefits of cooperation, rather than in the paradigm of competitive advantage. In transport companies, common problems such as empty loads, rising gasoline prices and demands for internation-alization are growing and thus, companies are searching for solutions to adequately overcome these issues. The contribution of this paper is to further investigate the practical view of practitioners on clustering and its influence on the performance of transport companies. This will be achieved by an exploration of a case company from Slovenia, which will be undertaken through in-depth interviews with company repre-sentatives and their partners. The interview results showed that the benefits provided by interconnecting in the cluster bring a regularity and security which in today's economic world is very important. The disadvantages are virtually negligible when compared to the financial and organizational benefits of clustering, especially when looking from the perspective of financial stability and long-term performance. We can pinpoint this to their regulated functioning and contractual relationships, well managed operations and primarily, on the fair division of work among all partners, which is also the concluding recommendation to other transport clusters Europe-wide.