German railways fired the head of its crisis-hit freight branch, unions said Wednesday, a month after a change of boss at the helm of the company, which is being restructured in the face of alarming punctuality on trains. At the head of DB Cargo’s freight section since 2020, Sigrid Nikutta, 56, will leave her position, the railway union EVG said, confirming information from the newspaper. The mirror.
Contacted, the public rail group declined to comment. This decision still needs to be approved by Deutsche Bahn’s supervisory board, German Transport Ministry spokesman Georg Link said at a regular German government press conference, adding that he is “of course concerned about the fate of DB Cargo.”
Layoffs and transfers
Freight transport has long been a problem area for DB, with its continued decline under the leadership of Sigrid Nikutta, a drop in its turnover of 3.2% in 2024 and a sharp drop in its market share. To correct the situation, it announced in December 2024 the elimination of 5,000 jobs out of a total of 17,000 until 2029. A little earlier, DB announced the sale of Schenker, its logistics subsidiary, an operation valued at 14.3 billion euros that was to help recover the German railway operator in crisis, burdened by a debt of 30 billion euros.
This plan is “objectively inadequate to eliminate the causes of the crisis and recover competitiveness,” according to an expert opinion by a consulting firm published on Monday in the weekly Spiegel. The EVG union denounced a “disastrous” record and a “strategy of blind reduction, minimization and fragmentation.”
The same fate as Fret SNCF?
So far, the parent company is compensating for the losses, but the European Commission requires that DB Cargo be autonomously profitable from 2026. If it does not succeed, this subsidiary, which generates 20% of DB’s income, could be divided and sold as Fret SNCF, divided due to state aid considered illegal by Brussels.
Since the beginning of the school year, the Berlin group, 100% owned by the German State, has been committed to a new beginning, with the replacement in September of its former boss Richard Lutz by the head of regional lines Evelyn Palla. Catastrophic punctuality of trains, aging infrastructure, criticism from users…: the group hopes to advance more quickly on these projects with the billions of euros of public investments guaranteed by the government of Friedrich Merz.
Source: BFM TV
