ÖBB Annual Report 2023

3 Management & Supervisory Board Quality takes centre stage. ÖBB is able to look back on another commercially positive financial year in 2023. Unfavourable factors such as a weaker global economy, ongoing supply chain problems at suppliers and extreme weather events have, however, posed major challenges for rail operations. In addition, ÖBB was faced with capacity bottlenecks as a result of extreme delays in the delivery of trains that had long since been ordered. The focus is now on safeguarding the customary quality and increasing the resilience of the railway system. This year’s review of the past financial year is divided into two parts. In economic terms, 2023 was quite satisfactory overall with Group EBT of EUR 112 million despite the general conditions referred to previously. In terms of quality, however, we were unable to fulfil our customers’ high expectations as usual – particularly in the 2nd half of the year. Passenger transport was faced with overcrowded trains, delays and train cancellations, while freight transport was confronted with reliability problems caused by unforeseeable construction work on the international railway network. In addition, ÖBB-Infrastruktur AG had an unusually high number of incidents to deal with – caused by extreme weather events and the very heavy utilisation of the rail network. We declare 2024 the Year of Quality! We are declaring 2024 a “Year of Quality” with the aim of returning to ÖBB’s customary high quality despite a further increase in services. Our activities range from maintaining the infrastructure, servicing our existing rolling stock and procuring new trains and locomotives to organising the timetable and route planning for passenger and goods trains. All areas relevant to rail operations need to contribute to the 2024 quality year by reviewing, evaluating and – where necessary – redesigning and digitalising processes. After all, we want to return very quickly to where we were in recent years: as a quality leader at the forefront of railway undertakings in the EU! In 2023: a year of records in passenger transport The travel boom that began in 2022 has continued unabated in the past year. 2023 is the most successful year in ÖBB’s history, with a total of more than 490 million passengers travelling on local and long-distance services and on our buses. A more than welcome development – in terms of climate protection. While we have been used to ÖBB being able to cope with every increase in transport services without any problems and with the usual high quality regarding punctuality, safety and cleanliness, we have unfortunately not always been able to do so in the past year. There was a lack of sufficient wagons for local transport, particularly from the 4th quarter of 2023, and also for long-distance transport from ÖBB ANNUAL REPORT 2023: statement from the Board of Management >