Russian Railways say to revise long-term plan to delay targets

MOSCOW, May 22 (PRIME) -- Russian Railways plans to revise the long-term development plan to achieve the earlier planned figures by 2025, Deputy CEO Alexei Shilo said at an online briefing on Friday.

"It is clear that the situation in the world today pushes us to update features of the long-term program. We are working on it now. It is too early to say how seriously it will change," Shilo said.

"We think that the long-term development plan will deviate from the earlier set figures in the next year or two, after which there will be a recovery to attain the earlier planned figures. We do not want to cancel the goals we set earlier."

Russian Railways earlier forecast 2020 loading growth of 2.9%, but CEO Oleg Belozyorov said in March loading can fall by at least 1%.

Shilo said that Russian Railways has no plans to change the long-term cargo traffic tariffs set until 2025 and calculated as inflation minus but does not rule out adjustments in certain cases with consent of market participants.

The company is ready to present a new model of cargo tariffs after 2025 in June, Shilo said. "I think we will start to discuss the ready (model) with all the interested sides from June," he said.

According to Shilo, Russian Railways opposes deep tariff cuts and asks for tariff deregulation in problematic cases.

He also said that the company provided 24 billion rubles of incentives to cargo consignors in 2020.

(70.9240 rubles – U.S. $1)  

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