Stadler Rail has recently been hit hard by severe weather disasters: production has been severely affected in some cases. At the same time, there are delays in a major order from Berlin. Therefore, the train manufacturer in eastern Switzerland has to lower its forecasts for 2024.
View of the production hall of Stadler Rail AG in Bussnang. Bild: keystone
The storm disaster in Spain at the end of October also affected Stadler Rail, the company announced on Wednesday evening. The plant remained undamaged and the same applies to the approximately 3,000 employees. However, several of Stadler Valencia’s satellite warehouses were affected.
And above all, around 30 Stadler Valencia suppliers were hit hard, according to the announcement. These cannot supply the required components and the Stadler factory is currently working at a reduced rate. Between 150,000 and 200,000 production hours would have to be postponed until 2025 and vehicles would not be delivered as planned.
Plant in Valais flooded
The supplier Constellium in Valais is also working through a backlog after its factory was flooded in June. The manufacturer of aluminum profiles will probably not have caught up with its backlog until the end of August 2025. And in Austria, a Stadler commissioning center was flooded in September.
Only Stadler Rail’s problems in Berlin are not due to a storm. The company won a major tender from the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (BVG) in 2019.
After an appeal by Alstom and production problems due to the Covid pandemic, a software problem was recently added, according to the announcement. The BVG has only ordered 376 of the 1,500 cars so far, so the plant in Berlin-Pankow is underutilized.
Guidance is suspended
All in all, these four events are likely to reduce the EBIT margin in 2024 – according to an initial assessment – by a maximum of 2 percentage points, explained Stadler Rail. Previously, the company had expected profitability of more than 5 percent.
At the same time, the previous sales target of 3.5 to 3.7 billion francs could no longer be achieved in 2024, the communiqué continued. Part of the sales will be postponed until 2025. To what extent cannot currently be quantified.
At the same time, Stadler Rail is suspending the guidance for the 2025 and 2026 financial years because the effects cannot yet be estimated. The company will do this in the first quarter of 2025, as soon as the 2025 budget has been revised and the financial planning for the following years has been prepared.
Stadler is currently working on a “catch-up program,” the company emphasized. A similar program enabled the company to quickly catch up after the Covid pandemic. (lak/sda/awp)
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