“This is a service to society”

In 2025, Vossloh AG once again increased both sales and earnings. The financial statements, which the company is presenting on Thursday in Frankfurt, also show a record level of order intake. We spoke with CEO Oliver Schuster about this.

Mr. Schuster, as an infrastructure company, Vossloh often operates in the background – infrastructure usually doesn’t attract much attention: “As long as it works, that’s what counts.” At the moment, however, everyone is talking about infrastructure. Good for Vossloh?

It’s good for all of us when infrastructure gets the attention it deserves. In the rail sector, many states have underinvested for decades and cut costs at the expense of infrastructure. We must now pay off this societal debt if we want to offer a safe and reliable rail system as an attractive option for the sustainable mobility of people and goods. In this regard, I am pleased to see the existing awareness of the problem and the associated investment programs that many states have launched.

Is this development the driving force behind Vossloh’s successful business performance over the past year?

Vossloh is an important partner for rail network operators all over the world. This is reflected in our order books, which in the past financial year included major orders for new high-speed connections in the United Kingdom and China. Our order situation in Sweden, for example, is also at a high level thanks to rising demand from the infrastructure operator Trafikverket. And with Deutsche Bahn, we have once again concluded a comprehensive framework agreement for the supply of major turnout components worth over 100 million euros.

Overall, Vossloh reached new record levels in terms of order volume last year. For the first time, the order backlog at year-end exceeded the one billion euro threshold.

This is a tremendous vote of confidence from our customers and a major success for our employees all over the world. The Sateba Group, which is part of Vossloh since October, also added to this. Including Sateba’s contribution, order intake in 2025 reached a new all-time high of 1.399 billion euros.

On October 1, 2025, Vossloh acquired Sateba, the European manufacturer of concrete ties – the largest acquisition in the company’s history to date.

This instantly made Vossloh roughly one quarter larger in terms of employees and sales – an enormous enrichment for us. Our roughly one thousand new colleagues have, supported by a comprehensive integration program, become a full part of our corporate family in a very short period of time. With this step, Vossloh is now also one of the market leaders in the European concrete tie business and can offer European customers even more comprehensive integrated solutions. 

“Sateba also strengthens us in terms of sustainability” 

One of the first contracts Sateba was able to win as part of Vossloh is a comprehensive framework agreement for the supply of concrete sleepers to the Norwegian rail infrastructure operator Bane NOR. A key reason for this success was that more than 40 percent of CO2 emissions are saved in production compared to conventional manufacturing. So Sateba also strengthens us from a sustainability perspective.

The first-time consolidation of the Sateba Group also had a positive impact on sales and earnings in the past financial year.

Our sales revenues rose significantly in 2025, to 1.343 billion euros – a new record high. In addition to Sateba, major infrastructure projects in Algeria and China also contributed to this. Business in Northern and Eastern Europe, for example in Sweden and Poland, also developed particularly dynamically. Earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT), adjusted for effects from the purchase price allocation for Sateba, rose by 13.7 percent to 119.6 million euros. This development was driven both by the contribution of the Sateba Group and by strong results in our turnout business.

To manufacture turnouts, Vossloh opened a new plant in Bendigo, Australia, last year.

Australia is one of the countries that are heavily investing in their rail infrastructure and have extensive plans to expand and build new rail connections. Our new plant sets a global benchmark for precision, automation, and sustainability in turnout production.

Investments like the one in Bendigo secure our future business. In total, we invested 88.3 million euros in 2025. In this context, the development of our liquid funds is particularly encouraging: Free cash flow reached 98.8 million euros in the past financial year, an increase of 14.9 percent compared to the already high prior-year level. And free financial resources are important, because we want to continue to grow.

At the beginning of the year, Vossloh placed a hybrid bond in the amount of 250 million euros: Is this money earmarked for further acquisitions?

The rail infrastructure market is undergoing a fundamental transformation. As in other industries, the driving force is digitalization. It enables us to analyze data on the condition of the infrastructure—collected via an extensive network of sensors—using artificial intelligence, and to develop customized plans for our customers that support needs-based and predictive maintenance.

Digital expertise as the key to the future 

Vossloh is a pioneer in this development. In 2025, we gained additional partners for our cloud platform Vossloh connect and further strengthened our own competencies with additional expertise. To further expand our digital capabilities, we will also continue to rely on the acquisition of companies going forward. This was one of the reasons why we placed the hybrid bond. The issue was oversubscribed several times; the strong demand from institutional investors is an impressive vote of confidence in the strategic direction of our company.

Digitalization also means optimizing your own business processes. How far along is Vossloh in this respect?

This is a central issue for us. As a systems house and solution provider for rail infrastructure that offers customers integrated solutions, cooperation within the company must function smoothly across business units and regions. Everyone must be able to access comparable data and work along uniformly defined processes. To achieve this, we are introducing a standardized enterprise resource planning system that enables joint planning and management of corporate resources within our business processes. In the reporting year, we successfully migrated Fastening Systems in Germany, the first lead company of a business unit, to SAP S/4HANA and are now rolling this out across the entire company.

Projects like this involve a lot of change for employees. What do they say?

A survey we conducted among employees in the summer of 2025 showed a very positive picture. Overall satisfaction is very high, and the vast majority of colleagues would recommend Vossloh as an employer. These results are above the benchmark for our industry and make me proud. The high participation rate and an impressive number of comments submitted clearly show that our employees see Vossloh as their company and personally want to help us continue to improve together.

“Our employees are the foundation of our success” 

Our motivated and highly skilled employees are the foundation of our company’s success. I would like to take this opportunity to thank them personally and on behalf of the entire Executive Board for their tremendous commitment. Not least thanks to our outstanding workforce, we believe that our company is very well positioned for the future to tackle the major challenges in the rail infrastructure sector together with our customers.

To be specific: What is your forecast for this year? 

For 2026, we expect another significant step in growth. The full-year consolidation of the Sateba Group will be the main driver here. Overall, we anticipate sales between 1.56 and 1.66 billion euros. EBIT is also expected to continue to rise and is forecast to be in the range of 118.5 to 131 million euros. Since this figure is significantly influenced by effects from the purchase price allocation for the Sateba Group, we are additionally providing a forecast for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, EBITDA, for 2026, as it allows a more meaningful assessment of the Group’s earning power this year. We expect EBITDA to be between 215 and 230 million euros, corresponding to a margin of 13.5 to 14.5 percent.

What does this mean for the shareholders of Vossloh AG?

In light of the positive business performance and the strong order situation, the Executive Board and Supervisory Board will propose to the Annual General Meeting on May 6 that a further increased dividend of 1.15 euros be paid for the 2025 financial year.

So, shareholders also benefit from the work done to maintain the infrastructure.

Everyone benefits from this. Working to ensure a functioning infrastructure and a reliable rail is a service to society. The proper functioning of these lifelines is also crucial to the level of trust people have in our political system—an important building block for the future of our democracy.