In the medium term, SNCF CEO Jean-Pierre Farandou believes he has stayed the course in the Covid-19 storm, with the accounts now under control and the ambition to develop the train share, but the “clouds” they could darken your horizon. head of the public group in November 2019, two months later Mr. Farandou became head for five years of the “new SNCF”, a public limited company created by the latest railway reform.
Mr. Farandou was immediately greeted by the long strike against pension reform, which cost the company a billion euros. The health crisis followed, “which caused us to lose some 10,000 million in turnover in two years.” “The TGV, after forty years of growth, found itself at a standstill. It had an incredible economic impact” because the SNCF’s favorite train usually provides it with most of its means, he recalls. “But the box held.”
And now, the consequences of the war in Ukraine “pose great problems of additional costs”, worries the leader, quite austere compared to his extravagant predecessor Guillaume Pepy. Jean-Pierre Farandou considers the results of the first half of 2022 “encouraging”, published on Thursday. Le groupe public est revenu dans le vert, son chiffre d’affaires a rebondi -greatly helped by logistics- and the economic objectives set by the railway reform of 2018 devraient être atteints.”On n’est plus surendés”, se réjouit- The.
The State assumed more than 35 billion in debt as planned; the company, for its part, made significant savings and sold non-strategic assets. However, the sky could darken, Farandou warns, judging possible a new wave of Covid-19, a worsening of the economic situation or a big strike if the pension reform is back on the table. end of the year,” he predicts.
“Otherwise, we’ll see. And energy prices, in particular, worry him for next year. Jean-Pierre Farandou acknowledges that the launch at the beginning of the year of the new SNCF Connect application, mocked for its errors, had been “insufficiently prepared”.
“In a year’s time, we won’t talk about it anymore,” he says, still believing that it will become “the basis of the future great application of mobility in France.” More generally, “there are still things to be done” on the main train pricing project. But the new bonus cards, acclaimed by the public, largely allow “avoiding runaway yield management” – the rise in prices when the train is full -, he believes. “I reinstated the idea that the vocation of the train is to be popular (…) Basically, our reason for being is to transport a lot of people, so that people want to take the train, and not their car,” he underlines. “We’re a bit of a victim of our success,” she smiles, now that summer attendance is breaking new records. “Better!”
For Jean-Pierre Farandou, this post-Covid return “validates (his) commercial policy”, and demonstrates the usefulness of the train, much more ecological than the car or the plane.
The SNCF boss proposes a large investment plan in the railway sector that would allow the train quota to be doubled in about fifteen years. Around 100,000 million euros would be needed. The ball is now in the court of the new Government, he indicates, pointing out that the investment, which concerns the entire country, does not seem unreasonable: barely triple what the only meter of the Great Paris.
Meanwhile, the company continues to close ranks against the competition, which is beginning to arrive. Trenitalia launched at high speed in Paris-Lyon and the tenders for the TER in the region multiply “We can compare ourselves with what the competitors offer”, boasts Mr. Farandou. The competitiveness gap is no longer so obvious: “It’s simmering everywhere,” he says, as projects flourish throughout SNCF. On the social level in particular, the manager believes that he has resumed dialogue with the unions. “We are going to review all the group’s human resources policies,” he announces, recalling that he has been a railway worker for 42 years.
Source: BFM TV
