Vehicle sales are likely to represent only about 90 percent of Europe’s truck-related revenue pool by 2035. The remaining 10 percent will consist of various life cycle services, which, because of their significantly higher profitability, will likely make up around 90 percent of total profit pools. This makes them a highly attractive growth opportunity (exhibit).
Of the €17.5 billion in projected recurring profit from life cycle services by 2035, aftersales and financial services are forecast to be worth about €5.1 billion and €1.4 billion, respectively. Aftersales monetize uptime and vehicle use while financial services involve ownership, residual-value exposure, and recurring payments. Additional important recurring profit pools include insurance, data-enabled services, and energy or charging services.
Typically, each service is provided by a different company and even OEMs offering multiple services often manage and deliver them in silos. Developing integrated offerings for customers is critical to becoming a life cycle partner, supporting fleet operators in the transition to zero-emission (ZE) trucks, and building a continuous customer relationship. Companies need to combine the right set of partners and offerings for a compelling customer value proposition, while carefully managing economics and risks.
Aftermarket services: The largest downstream value pool
Europe’s truck and bus aftermarket is large, resilient, and anchored in an aging fleet. While its resilience is visible, it is not evenly distributed, and scale alone is unlikely to separate winners from the rest. What may differentiate winners is controlling demand throughout the vehicle life cycle by combining life cycle portfolio and asset management, integrated financing and uptime contracts, and data-driven service, pricing, and residual-value steering.
A resilient market but not a quiet one
In 2025, the EU medium- and heavy-duty truck (MHDT) aftermarket revenue pool was estimated at €52.1 billion, growing to €56.5 billion by 2030 and €56.7 billion by 2035.1 Its attraction is predictability, not hypergrowth: Essentially all of the pool’s growth will happen in the first half of the decade ahead, tracking not vehicle sales but the state of the existing vehicle fleet (roughly 6.2 million vehicles with an average age of more than 14 years). Replacement parts account for about 86 percent of the aftermarket profit pool; tires around 14 percent.
But electrification is arriving fast, and it is where nearly all of the pool’s shift-based growth after 2030 will originate. Sales of new zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) are expected to account for around 46 percent of the EU HDT market by 2035, with total aftermarket revenue tied to servicing these vehicles expanding at an estimated 40 to 50 percent CAGR through 2035 to make up about 9 to 10 percent of the total aftermarket value from near-zero today. The emerging ZEV segment is on track to become the primary source of aftermarket growth in the second half of the decade, requiring staff and training before it scales.
Closing the execution gap
One of the most revealing elements of Europe’s aftermarket is not its size but the performance gap among OEMs. While brand heritage and an installed base create the right to play, they do not guarantee monetization. A decisive question is whether companies can convert vehicles in operation into controlled, recurring, high-quality demand.
Proprietary benchmark analysis across OEMs shows how wide the spread can be.2 Captive-network market share has a median value of 77 percent, ranging from 69 percent among lower-quartile performers to 87 percent among top-quartile performers. The share of genuine parts follows a similar pattern: a median of 82 percent, ranging from 72 to 86 percent, while economy and value-tier parts range from 6 to 18 percent (median 12 percent) and circular or remanufactured parts range from 4 to 14 percent (median 9 percent).
Because deliberate trade-offs are often made, the question is not who has the highest captive share. The winners will be those that deliberately match genuine parts, economy/independent aftermarket (IAM), and remanufactured offers to vehicle age, while the laggards will be those that overdefend their premium share—losing older-fleet volume outright—or give up too much margin by targeting too many segments. This matters because Chinese OEMs are, by design, entering via the same IAM-partnership route some incumbents already use.
Why the performance gap could increase
Several shifts will make execution quality more important, and two customer-facing facts explain why. First, uptime is not a soft differentiator: 47 percent of European fleet buyers rank vehicle uptime among their top five purchasing criteria, meaning “sell uptime, not repair events” is a purchasing reality, not an aspirational slogan.3 Second, brand loyalty is weak: 41 percent of European fleet customers say they would switch providers for a price reduction of just 10 percent. That’s why locking in service and maintenance contracts early, before price sensitivity gets tested by a new entrant, has real defensive value.
The ZE powertrain transition will likely require dual capabilities: defending ICE life cycle economics for the large installed vehicle base while building network readiness for ZE complexity before it scales. These point toward a more concentrated, integrated revenue pool: Customers will increasingly expect bundled packages (vehicle provision, fleet management, remote-operations support, charging, predictive maintenance, and uptime guarantee) rather than discrete transactions. That will be both a positive development for players that can monetize life cycle and operations-related services and a genuine structural threat to single-point revenue lines such as stand-alone crash repair. It also suggests OEMs may want to move from siloed new-vehicle, aftermarket, and financial-services teams toward a combined, cross-departmental structure that requires an organizational change as much as a commercial one.
The aftermarket leadership agenda
For OEMs and other ecosystem players, the path forward starts with a more granular view of demand. Companies could make three moves, in sequence:
- Quantify leakage at the segment level and then decide where to defend premium share and where to trade it for volume. Aggregated captive-share numbers by vehicle age, country, customer type, and product category can hide both where independent providers are gaining ground and where an OEM’s own low captive-share numbers reflect a working economy/IAM strategy rather than a leak. This diagnostic determines whether the fix is to “raise captive share” (a young-fleet, premium-segment problem) or to “open the economy/IAM channel faster” (an older-fleet, volume-retention problem). Treating both as the same fix is a common and costly mistake.
- Scale repair-and-maintenance contracts earlier in the ownership cycle, locking in recurring revenue before the documented 41 percent price-switching risk is tested by competitors.
- Build ZEV service readiness (high-voltage diagnostics, technician training, battery-health monitoring), funded by, not competing with, internal combustion engine aftermarket cash flow. Given that the ZEV service segment is still only expected to make up about 9 to 10 percent of pool value by 2035 (even with a CAGR of 40 to 50 percent), this is a capability investment to make ahead of the curve, not a near-term revenue substitute for the ICE base that funds it.
Gen AI is a genuine accelerant across all three moves (sharper leakage diagnostics, predictive scheduling, and improved diagnostics and technician guidance), but it accelerates the mechanism rather than being the mechanism itself (for an example, see sidebar “Where AI moves the needle in aftermarket”).
Aftermarket winners are unlikely to be those with the largest installed bases or highest captive-share numbers, but rather those that convert installed base into controlled demand and data-enabled uptime propositions, using the right channel and portfolio strategy by vehicle-age segment. Market growth is almost entirely front-loaded, with the ZEV-linked segment doing most of the work after 2030. The window to build advantage is narrowing, particularly against new entrants, which are already finding faster routes to network coverage than building their own captive systems.
Financial services: Capturing downstream value
While the aftermarket is the largest post-purchase profit pool, financial services are expected to outgrow underlying truck volumes, driven by a structural shift toward higher-value ZEVs. As a result, financial-service players can become key orchestrators of downstream value creation, controlling the commercial life cycle through financing, contracts, risk transfer, residual value management, and asset steering. They can also maintain a continuous customer interface throughout ownership, generating recurring interactions and proprietary data. This can strengthen customer retention, keep customers within the OEM ecosystem, and create a platform for additional value creation such as bundled services and consolidated billing. The strategic mandate is clear: Customers are searching for one-stop-shop solutions that enable different ownership models, mitigate operational risk, and manage asset complexity in an integrated, cost-efficient way.4 This is being driven by multiple factors:
- The truck financial-services pool is growing structurally. The European HDT market is expected to grow moderately in unit terms (from about 336,000 vehicles in 2025 to an estimated 384,000 by 2035) while its financial-services revenue pool is expected to expand significantly faster. This is because financial services in Europe operate on a much newer truck population that is focused primarily on catering to first and second owners of vehicles.
- The ZEV transition will propel growth for financial services. The driver is not volume, but mix: Through 2035, ZEV share is expected to rise from an estimated 2 percent of total sales to about 46 percent, increasing both average financed asset values and finance and leasing penetration. As a result, the truck financial-services revenue pool is expected to grow from about €40 billion in 2025 to roughly €51 billion by 2035, outpacing underlying truck unit growth.
- Costs are the predominant driver of customer choices. When asked what will drive customer choice in 2030, five of seven executives cite lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) as the primary factor, while two point to guaranteed uptime. No respondent names financing, flexible ownership, or user models as the primary driver, instead referring to these factors in connection with overall TCO.5
- Impact on TCO is the most decisive factor for financial services. Success in financial services depends on making higher-value ZEV assets economically viable by absorbing residual-value uncertainty and translating improved TCO into bankable, life cycle–integrated contracts. Five of seven surveyed executives name residual-value uncertainty as the biggest obstacle to scaling ZEV leasing.6
- No single player owns the full customer journey across the vehicle life cycle. Even though adoption lags behind, the industry debate7 on managing the ZE transition remains elevated. Beyond the initial vehicle sale, the key question is which players capture value comprehensively across the vehicle life cycle. As battery-electric-vehicle TCO approaches diesel parity, success will likely depend less on financing the initial transaction and more on the ability to fund, operate, and remarket vehicles across multiple ownership cycles. Executives are cautious about timing: Views remain mixed on how quickly usage-based and subscription models will become standard, suggesting the orchestrator role will be built on bundled service contracts before pure usage models scale.8
Implications for financial-services players
This reordering creates both opportunity and exposure for financial-services players. Especially OEM captive financial-services players are well-placed to deliver integrated life cycle offerings, given their proximity to the vehicle, the point-of-sale customer relationship, and access to the broader OEM service ecosystem. But rising financing volumes increase demands on balance sheets and risk-bearing capacity, a burden that weighs most heavily on smaller captives dependent on OEM-parent funding rather than independent capital-market access.
As a result, OEMs could look to make deliberate choices about the role of their captives. Those choices play out in a market in which universal and specialized banks, independent lessors, and OEM captives all compete for the future financial-services pool. Universal banks and specialized lenders currently hold about 70 percent of the European truck financing and leasing pool, and OEM captives hold the remaining 30 percent. Noncaptive banks can offer a structurally lower cost of funds and larger balance sheets, giving them an edge on headline pricing in plain-vanilla financing. But cheaper rates alone are unlikely to define competitive advantage, and captives can diversify funding beyond OEM capitalization, including through stronger asset-backed-securities capabilities or third-party investors.
Rising vehicle prices, economic volatility, and growing residual-value risk could push customers toward more-flexible ownership models, such as leasing, rental, and pay per use, which tend to shift residual value risk toward asset owners. New entrants competing on price may add further margin pressure, reinforcing the case for more-flexible commercial models. Gen AI could help captives offset part of that cost disadvantage in underwriting and pricing.
Build an operating model for life cycle asset management
Two models are emerging: one that has a customer-facing financing/leasing orchestrator using external funding partners for balance-sheet scale; the other a broader life cycle orchestrator integrating financing, services, uptime, and asset management into one proposition. Captives with thin funding capacity and subcritical share are likely to find the first more realistic, while those with a solid funding base and dense service networks can pursue the second.
The priority is to strengthen three things:
- Asset economics: residual-value management, risk-based pricing, used-asset steering, and remarketing
- The proposition: service-bundle design, including insurance and other adjacent services
- The route to market: channel management across dealer and distribution partnerships, underpinned by refinancing access and data-enabled portfolio monitoring
Success will likely result less from building every capability in-house and more from combining proprietary strengths with external partnerships to access scale, funding capacity, and cross-sell opportunities while retaining control of the customer relationship. As the adoption of ZEVs increases asset values and customers shift toward leasing and outcome-based models, captives should derisk assets, monetize contracts, and steer life cycle economics across a broader partner ecosystem, with gen AI as a productivity engine.
