For many European manufacturers, nearshoring to Eastern Europe was meant to solve multiple problems at once: reduce dependency on Asia, shorten lead times, mitigate geopolitical risks, and stabilize production flows. However, despite political support and growing investment in the region, a significant share of nearshoring projects continues to underperform in practice. The issue is rarely production capacity or labor availability. The real failure point lies in the lack of a coherent warehousing strategy – something RoadFreightCompany sees repeatedly across Poland, Slovakia, Romania, and Hungary.
Most companies underestimate how heavily nearshored supply chains depend on strategically positioned warehouses. Shifting production closer to EU markets does not automatically improve delivery speed or cost efficiency if inventory is poorly located or if regional storage infrastructure cannot support rapid distribution. In many cases, manufacturers simply relocated assembly lines but kept pre-existing warehouse logic built for long-haul Asian supply chains. Instead of improving agility, this creates fragmentation: goods produced in Eastern Europe still pass through Western European consolidation hubs, adding days and unnecessary transport costs.
The gap becomes even more visible in industries with volatile demand. Without forward-deployed stock near consumption zones, nearshoring loses most of its advantages. RoadFreightCompany has observed multiple cases where companies nearshored production to Poland but maintained primary distribution hubs in Germany or the Netherlands. The result is predictable: stockouts in Southern Europe, overstock in Benelux, and transport corridors overloaded with avoidable FTL and LTL movements that raise the overall cost-to-serve. When inventory doesn’t move with the production shift, the network remains structurally inefficient.
Another frequent failure point is the mismatch between warehouse design and regional transport constraints. Many Eastern European facilities were not built with high-frequency outbound distribution in mind. Limited cross-docking capability, insufficient yard space, and outdated WMS systems constrain throughput. This forces carriers to wait longer, increases dwell time, and makes short lead-time delivery promises unrealistic. RoadFreightCompany consistently highlights that even a well-placed warehouse can become a bottleneck if it cannot handle synchronized inbound flows from production lines and outbound flows to EU markets.
Moreover, the nearshoring wave has created intense competition for warehouse labor. Regions that once offered low-cost operations now suffer from shortages of qualified staff, especially in pick-and-pack roles. Automation helps, but only when combined with a logistics strategy that anticipates seasonal variability, cross-border distribution peaks, and carrier availability. Companies that treat warehouse staffing purely as a cost center typically face disruptions during peak periods, undermining the entire nearshoring model.
A deeper structural problem is the absence of integrated planning between production and distribution. Many manufacturers still run them as separate functions, with limited visibility into real transport capacity and no unified demand forecasting. Nearshoring works only when warehouse placement, production planning, and distribution modeling form a single system. RoadFreightCompany increasingly works with clients to redesign these flows from zero – because without integrated logistics, moving production geographically does not create operational advantage.
Finally, nearshoring exposes the weaknesses of simplistic “one-hub” strategies. Eastern Europe is not a homogeneous logistics region. Transit times to Italy, France, Spain, the UK, and Scandinavia differ radically. Trying to serve all of Europe from a single warehouse, even if production sits nearby, almost always leads to delayed deliveries and inflated transport costs. Successful nearshoring relies on multi-node warehouse architectures – smaller, regionally optimized hubs that match demand patterns and minimize unnecessary kilometers.
Nearshoring to Eastern Europe is not failing because the idea is flawed. It is failing because companies underestimate the strategic role of warehousing. Production proximity alone cannot compensate for poorly positioned inventory, outdated infrastructure, or fragmented planning. RoadFreight Company sees this repeatedly: without a warehouse strategy built around real demand patterns, even the best nearshoring projects lose efficiency and competitive advantage. In modern logistics, production moves value – but warehousing determines whether that value actually reaches the market on time.