Large amounts of European manufacturers have enlarged their manufacturing networks to Asia, in most of the occasions to China and India. Also the growing demand in Asia as well as in Russia creates increasing need for cost efficient and lead time wise supply chain solutions. It depends on the used manufacturing and supply chain strategy, whether manufacturing units in a company's network use market focused (factory in particular region serves that market needs) or product group based (one manufacturing unit takes global delivery responsibility) control. In either case, manufacturers at the moment use "local sourcing" strategy to enhance supply chain control and responsiveness. However, this approach is incapable to use global sourcing opportunities, and utilize cheap raw materials and semi-finished items from Asia and Russia to be used in European manufacturing units. The constraints in this process are the transportation costs and delays; sea container transportation from Asia is cheap, but takes long time to be shipped to Europe (nearly two months), and correspondingly air transportation is expensive, and sets restrictions for the package size and weight. At the moment a third alternative also exist, where items are transported between Europe, Russia and Asia through Trans-Asian Railway network. This route provides moderate cost efficiency (as compared to air transportation) and lead time advantage (as compared to sea containers).

In this paper we analyze the survey research results, which was targeted on the largest manufacturers and retailers in Finland and Sweden. Based on the survey analysis, we estimate how transportation modal split (between road, sea, railway and air) will evolve in the future, and how traffic flows develop between Europe, Russia, South-Korea, India, China, and Japan. We also present estimation from the future transportation costs development. In the analysis phase we also consider, how large volumes could be shifted to railway connection, and how wise customer picking could smoothen the transportation amounts from and to Russia/Asia. Also avenues for further research are being proposed based on our quantitative analysis.