Intercontainer-Interfrigo SA posts €2.9M profit for fiscal 2007-8
Intercontainer-Interfrigo SA (ICF), the European operator of combined rail/road transport services, ended FY07 (ended 31 March 2008) with a profit of €2.9M, for a total volume of 415,800 TEU, down 3.3% year-on-year.
In its 40th year of activity, ICF expanded the range of shuttle and feeder services in the latter part of the year. Growth in all major East and South-East traffics was substantial, said ICF, adding that it managed to improve quality of service despite a number of practical difficulties such as infrastructure bottlenecks and strikes.
The drop in volumes are attributed mainly to capacity problems in Western and Northern ports, which had a generally adverse effect on transport quality on routes where ICF volumes are traditionally large. To prevent slippages in the standards delivered to its customers as far as possible, capacity and train frequency in the Western and Northern ports were only partly reduced.
At 1194 km, the average distance per TEU was slightly higher than in 2006, in keeping with ICF's strategy of focussing on the longer European corridors or on niches specifically requiring experience of intermodal operations. Further evidence of the effects of this strategy may be seen in the average distance in continental traffic, which rose once again by 2.5% to reach 1588 km per TEU.
Within the geographical area corresponding to its core markets of South-East Europe, Switzerland and the CIS, a number of new services and increases in existing service frequencies were introduced in the latter part of FY07.
These included the Sopron–Istanbul block trains, where frequency was raised by an additional train per week to reach 6 block trains in the West–East direction and 4 trains from East to West.
Several shuttle services now also operate more frequently: Mannheim–Sopron shuttle increased from 1 to 2 weekly pairs, Wanne–Sopron from 2 to 3 weekly pairs, Koper–Budapest from 5 to 6 weekly pairs and Rekingen/Frenkendorf – Bremerhaven from 3 to 4 weekly pairs. A new shuttle train is now in service between Wolfurt and Antwerp and between Wanne (Ruhr area) and Bremerhaven.
ICF’s MD Franz Böni expects to capture new markets for unaccompanied intermodal transport in FY08, but also anticipates even fiercer competition. The danger of this trend, he said, is that "insufficient priority will be given to making proper use of resources at ports, terminals, train paths, wagons and so on.”
