“In any case, it is fair to say that we have steered a course through rough weather and that we can’t rule out storms and heavy sea in the future”, adds Nicolas Perrin. “But as the number one rail cargo company in Switzerland and as a leading international player on the north-south axis through Europe we are stronger than ever these days. So I have more than enough reasons to be optimistic about the evolution of SBB Cargo in the years to come.”
Consequences of the economic crisis
Nicolas Perrin: “SBB Cargo hoped to be able to publish positive results in 2007 already. Although the number of tons of freight transported kept on increasing we could not get out of our loss position. We would have got ourselves out of the red in 2008 if rail freight transport had not completely imploded in the space of just a few weeks in November. It’s true we did succeed in forcing down the deficit through a series of restructuring measures, so that in 2008 we booked a loss of ‘only’ CHF 29.9 million (20.4 million euros). The effect of the various turnaround measures undertaken then by SBB Cargo had the effect of saving around CHF 53 billion (36 million euros) in the end. Our output in 2008 came to a good 12.53 billion net ton-kilometres, and a total of nearly 57 million net tons of freight were transported. A major part was handled on the transalpine routes through Switzerland.”
Nicolas Perrin: “With a number of nimble interventions, we were able to compensate partly for declining revenues due to the economic crisis. In the first half of 2009 alone we were able to reduce the financial consequences of the economic crisis with a range of very effective countermeasures. Compared to the international competition we intervened very early on, and as early as August 2008 we took a lot of capacity out of the market. With a 16 percent decrease in business in the first half of 2009 we were amongst those with the lowest losses in Europe – on average European rail freight carriers recorded losses of around 25 per cent. It is obvious then that with this sort of economic conditions we put our investment programmes on ice. We did, however, continue to systematically renewing our fleet of shunting engines.”
The first to have our own branches abroad
Nicolas Perrin: “Our parent company, the Swiss Federal Railways - Schweizerische Bundesbahnen (SBB) in German - was founded in 1902, by merging and nationalising a large number of smaller and medium-sized railway companies. Under some special legislation the company was transformed in 1999 into a public limited company made up of three independent divisions: passenger transport, freight and infrastructure. This was also due to the fact that the market for railfreight transport was fully liberalised in Switzerland very early on.”
Nicolas Perrin: “This meant SBB Cargo lost transit cargo on the route through Switzerland, on which it had previously had a monopoly. Nonetheless we were the first railway company to set up its own branches abroad at the start of the 21st century – I’m talking about SBB Cargo Deutschland and SBB Cargo Italia. Following on from this I can add, too, that in addition to these subsidiaries, SBB Cargo is also the owner of the entire share capital of ChemOil Logistics AG (which is specialised in logistics for chemical products and petroleum) and has minority participations in RAlpin AG (30%), Hupac SA (23.85%) and Termini SA (20%) as well.”
Xrail : more quality for the customers
Nicolas Perrin: “As the market leader in Switzerland, our focus in the home market is on a wide range of customer-specific and standard freight services for domestic and import-export traffic. It may perhaps sound arrogant, but the reality is that the Swiss economy could barely exist without freight transportation by rail. As an international logistics service provider – with a national base network of 323 delivery points and 200 customer-specific solutions for locations outside the base network – we want, of course, to continue to put a clear emphasis on more traffic and business via the national network.”
Nicolas Perrin: “Our international focus is based on the strategy of running traction services for container transport and block trains on the routes between the North Sea ports and Northern Italy. SBB Cargo’s single-source cross border production on the North-South axis has will certainly be developed further.”
Nicolas Perrin: “Don’t forget either that about 40% of wagons transported by SBB Cargo are linked to destinations outside of Switzerland. So I am also expecting the Xrail alliance, which was founded in February, to provide a serious boost in terms of improving the quality of distribution transport. Seven of us UIC members have invested a lot of resources in it. Here too it will soon become obvious that cross-border cooperation is necessary to guarantee customers better commercial service provision and more quality. In fact we are convinced that we need excellent connections to the European rail network in order to be able to satisfy customers’ needs.”
