Märkte und Strategie

The German regional rail passenger transport market will continue to grow slightly over the next few years and thus remains one of the most interesting markets in Europe. Increasing regionalization funds will create stability for the next few years. DB Regional intends to benefit from this positive market environment as the largest provider. In recent years, however, numerous competitors have established themselves on the market, which has led to a continuous decline in DB Regional’s market share.

In the national bus market, competition in the regional bus market continues to increase, both as a result of tenders and of licensing auctions with purely commercial bids. In urban transport, bus services are often awarded to local municipal companies in in-house awards.

Innovative forms of mobility are increasingly being de­­vel­­­oped in the local transport market and result in changes to the market. In the future, car sharing, ride sharing and on-­­­­­demand concepts will become more established in the German transport market. DB Regional will flexibly respond to the changing mobility requirements of our customers and increasingly act as a provider of holistic mobility concepts in local transport.

• Economic dimension: We want to continuously im­­prove quality, thus increasing customer satisfaction, and defend our market position without sacrificing profitability and increase our innovative strength. To this end, we have launched Regional Railway of the Future (Zukunft Bahn Regio). For us, quality leadership in the regional rail passenger transport sector means arriving on time and without any issues. With this in mind, we continuously optimize our processes and quality awareness. We are completely redesigning our customer interface with digital products such as the DBroute agent. Working together with the public transport authorities, we are introducing WiFi in local transport. At the same time, competitive costs will continue to be an important criterion for success in future in a market that depends heavily on offer prices. We are systematically increasing our economies of scale along the entire value-added chain and optimizing our cross-divisional functions. We are generating growth in the maintenance market segment. In this area, we use our presence and experience to offer comprehensive maintenance services to third parties. We also want to attack networks of competitors in order to recover lost traffic. For this purpose, we have further professionalized our tender management, bundled relevant competencies in a Competence Center organization and worked intensively on our cost structures. Bus services still have to prove themselves in an environment that is becoming increasingly competitive. Cross-­departmental improvement management ensures optimized processes and systems and brings together the implementation coordination at the headquarters. By centralizing fleet management, information and communications technology, we are realizing cost advantages while at the same time improving performance. We are also continuing to work on the streamlining and standardization of our cross-divisional functions. We are reorganizing our regional organizational structure in the bus sector and expanding our branches to generate competitive and cost advantages. The responsibility for revenues in the future will be at the regional level while the responsibility for costs will reside with the branches. In the future, the control center and maintenance will be established as separate areas under the regional production managers.
• Social dimension: Satisfied and motivated employees are essential for success in the market. One important key to this is to actively involve employees in the continuous improvement of DB Regional and to support them in the ongoing change processes. These efforts include conducting employee surveys and organizing follow-up workshops to derive actions together. We have launched a preboarding and onboarding program to make the first steps of the job easier for new em­­­ployees. We have discussed and trained the operational managers in the most pertinent topics regarding employee management in practical workshops. We have initiated de-escalation training for our customer service employees in local transport and have started equipping them with defensive sprays.
• Environmental dimension: We will further develop our strengths as an environmentally friendly mode of transport, especially compared to car traffic. With this in mind, driver assistance systems for energy-saving driving No. 8 are currently being rolled out. Diesel buses with the highest emission standard Euro VI are used within the scope of our continuous fleet renewal. By continuously replacing our fleet, we are working toward im­­proving energy efficiency. We will also try other drive concepts as alternatives to conventional diesel together with interested public transport authorities. Hybrid, battery or hydrogen drives will play a role here. The aim is to reduce noise and emissions and conserve energy derived from fossil fuels, even on electrified branch lines.