The total number of outsourced EDCs is currently approximately 660, personnel size of about 30 FTEs per EDC, according to recent numbers of the Holland International Distribution Council [13]. Consequently, there are 20,000 people working in outsourced EDCs in Northern Europe. This leads to an estimate of US $1.5 billion of warehousing activities, and using the same estimate for transportation activities (a rule of thumb backed up by several interviews with TPL providers), to an estimate of US $3 billion for the total revenues realized by TPL providers in outsourced EDCs. Other activities and regions have to be added, for example outsourced transportation and warehousing activities in the English retail sector, which are estimated to be US $2 billion (see Figure 1 for more details), and ultimately we obtain a lower bound in the US
$5 billion range.