Ninety-four billion investments and a turnover destined to double in 10 years. These are the key objectives of the new 2016-2026 industrial plan of the State Railways, the new 2017-26 industrial plan presented on Wednesday morning in Rome by CEO Renato Mazzoncini and the president Gioia Ghezzi, in the presence of premier Matteo Renzi.
Of the 94 billion investments, 73 will be for new infrastructure, 14 for rolling stock and 7 for technological development. More than half of the resources are already available: 58 billion, of which 23 in self-financing and 35 already allocated in the program contracts.
Railway investments will amount to 62 billion, of which 33 for the conventional network, 24 for the HS/HC network and the European TEN-T corridors and 5 for technologies.
The investments planned for Anas will instead reach 15,5 billion.
The plan envisages that FS revenues will grow from 9 to 17,6 billion and Ebitda from 2,3 to 4,6 billion over the decade.
Between growth, integrations and new acquisitions – announces the group – the number of FS employees will be able to increase from the current 69 to around 100.
Not only that: CEO Renato Mazzoncini announced that the increase in annual spending on investments will generate over 21 new jobs a year, especially among contractor companies.
The plan provides integration with Anas (in view of the privatization and listing of the individual group companies) with the "initial phase" objective of synergies for 400 million savings.
As for the Strait Bridge, Mazzoncini specified that "the bridge today is an infrastructure that from the point of construction costs 3,9 billion, all the lines cost 120 billion", said Mazzoncini, thus emphasizing that the problem is not the economic cost and which project should be considered as a "railway corridor", while in the past it was tackled as a road project, involving a series of problems and increasing costs: "If it were treated as a railway work, it would have been managed in a completely different way than the road one (..) we are available to think about the Naples-Palermo corridor as well as all the others”.
Just about investing and the prime minister emphasized the need to relaunch them. “For a while _ he said Renzi – in Italy it was thought that complying with the austerity objectives would lead to a reduction in investments: it was a tragic mistake, which I don't want to attribute only to the previous ones, in quotation marks”. Renzi stressed that he considers the cut due to European austerity constraints a mistake: “In the worst two-year period 2012-2013 – he added – public investment halved from 40 to 20 billion a year. It is clear that this has led to a drop in the country's growth. The first consequence was to bring the construction sector to its knees and not give a sign of growth for the country. What can we do now? In the meantime, we have tried to free up resources for investment as much as possible. The theme of investments, on which Europe has given a partial response with the Juncker plan, is the fundamental theme and the credibility of the proposals that will come in 2017 will depend on this”.
