Raül Blanco leaves the presidency of Renfe “for personal reasons”

Raül Blanco will leave the presidency of Renfe “for personal reasons” on January 14. Blanco came to office in February 2023.

The company has confirmed that it will end its mandate next week by mutual agreement with the Ministry of Transport, to focus on new professional objectives in the private sector.

Blanco became president of Renfe in 2023, replacing Isaías Táboas, forced to resign for the case of the purchase of trains worth 258 million euros and later finding that the dimensions of the vehicles ordered from CAF were greater than the safety requirements of the tunnels through which they had to circulate, in Asturias and Cantabria.

In these almost two years, Blanco has focused the management of the railway operator on adapting it to high-speed competition. The company has defended its market share in all corridors and has faced the price war posed by its rivals, pointing out, in the case of Ouigo, a policy that does not respect competition rules.

In any case, the biggest problem that Renfe has had to face has been the expected renewal of its train fleet. The purchase in 2016 of 40 Avril trains from Talgo for 1.5 billion euros In 2024, it has gone from being the expected delivery of the definitive model to modernize Renfe to a disappointment that has sunk its punctuality ratios.

Since its delivery last May, incidents have been constant and have deteriorated the image of the company and the high speed with continuous delays on the lines. It was these incidents that cost the previous president of Adif, Ángel Contreras, his job. they brushed past Blanco. The last of them happened on January 1 and had nothing to do with the infrastructure manager’s works. All the Avril de Talgo trains that are active and used exclusively by Renfe stopped working due to a computer failure that was not resolved until the early hours of the 2nd. More than 14,000 people planned to travel that day. The company reacted quickly but demonstrated that it is not capable of definitively putting an end to the doubt involved in operating with a train model on which it has focused its future strategy, both in Spain and France.

All in all, Blanco’s management from an economic point of view was close to profit. The company has its greatest visibility in the high-speed market, where it competes with two other public companies, the French Ouigo (SNCF) and the Italian Iryo (Trenitalia) and where no one registers profits at the moment. In this context, the commercial services area of ​​Renfe Viajeros improved last year, going from losses of 70.12 million euros in 2023 to 45.42 million in 2024. For its part, the passenger transport subsidiary of Renfe cut losses to 43.16 million euros compared to the 65 million euros recorded in 2023.

In the immediate horizon of the company, the priority remains to defend its market share in high speed, a means of transport that continues to grow at a double-digit rate and in which the price war has already led rates to hit rock bottom in corridors at the limit of their capacity, like Madrid Barcelona. In the medium term, the company has pending international growth, especially in France and the development of its Commuter services. In the longer term, the priority will be to maintain dominance of high-speed services throughout the network, with the second phase of liberalization in Galicia, Asturias, the Basque Country and the Mediterranean Corridor. Ouigo, with its low-cost policy, has already declared its intention to be Renfe’s rival and has even asked Adif for the capacity to do so from 2029 by purchasing 8 trains from Talgo for 352 million. But Adif has rejected it.