It is not the first time that rail boss Richard Lutz has made a confession of failure.

On Thursday, too, he repeated what millions of Germans are currently experiencing on the train: "Quality and punctuality are currently unacceptable." But the actual message in the half-year press conference was different: Deutsche Bahn is making a profit again.

Thiemo Heeg

Editor in Business.

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For the first time since the beginning of the corona pandemic, the state-owned company has, according to its own statements, generated a positive operating result - it is said that it has returned to a "profitable growth path".

Above all, however, it is the non-rail business that contributes to this.

But also in the core business, earnings, sales and performance have increased significantly overall.

In the balance sheet, Deutsche Bahn shows an operating profit (EBIT adjusted) of 876 million euros for the first half of 2022.

The consolidated operating result improved by around 1.9 billion euros compared to the first half of 2021.

At that time, DB had to record a loss of almost one billion euros due to the pandemic.

Group sales increased by more than 28 percent compared to the first six months of 2021 to around 28 billion euros.

Not just a 9 euro ticket effect

As has recently become apparent, Germans are increasingly boarding trains again – and not just on regional trains thanks to the 9-euro ticket.

“Significantly more travelers used local and long-distance transport,” the company explained.

The company counted 59.1 million passengers in its long-distance trains in the first six months.

That is 117 percent more than in the same period of the previous year.

Around 725 million travelers took DB local trains, which corresponds to an increase of 60 percent.

In the first half of 2022, the transport performance of DB passenger transport by rail grew by 109 percent compared to the same period of the previous year to 36.4 billion passenger kilometers.

DB Cargo increased slightly in revenue (plus 5.6 percent) and traffic performance (plus 1.2 percent), but suffered from the effects of the Ukraine war and the construction-related capacity restrictions, as the railway explained.

Things were going better in logistics – it was “in demand like never before”.

The logistics subsidiary DB Schenker made by far the largest contribution to the Group's current success.

It was able to almost double its operating profit compared to the first six months of 2021 to around 1.2 billion euros.

"The trend reversal was successful: Demand is booming," summarized Lutz.

Uncertain forecast for 2022

The head of the railway said that the expansion projects were being built at a record level.

The railway and the federal government expanded the heavily used network into a high-performance network and started a general renovation of the busiest corridors from 2024.

A bundle of immediate measures should help earlier.

"Everything that brings improvements for customers now has priority," said Lutz.

However, although DB has continued to modernize and build at a record level, the rail infrastructure is currently unable to keep up with the growth in traffic.

More traffic jams on the rails and delays are the result.

In the first half of 2022, the official punctuality rate, which was calculated strongly in favor of the provider, was below the 70 percent mark: 69.6 percent.

In the first six months of the previous year, it was around ten percentage points more at 79.5 percent.

The forecast for the whole of 2022 is subject to a high degree of uncertainty due to the unforeseeable development of the Ukraine war and the corona pandemic.

At the end of the year, DB expects "considerably more sales and a significantly better operating result than predicted in March": The operating profit should be more than one billion euros, sales should grow to a good 54 billion euros.