Italian Railways (FS) achieved a remarkable turn round last year by cutting its huge loss of €2.12 billion in 2006 to €420 million. As Mr Mauro Moretti, CEO of FS, pointed out recently: "a reduction of €1.7 billion in a year is not small." According to Mr Vincenzo Soprano, CEO of Trenitalia (the train operating subsidiary of FS), the 2007 result was a bit better than forecast. "We had a very critical situation in 2006," Soprano explains. "All our business units, especially freight, were losing money, revenue was down and costs were too high." The resulting loss was more than four times the loss of €465 million in 2005. At the same time, FS faced stiffening competition from the increasing number of open-access and independent freight operators.
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