Blue Train revenues inch forward to P15m
Pauline Dikuelo | Friday October 5, 2018 14:30
The passenger rail service was reintroduced in April 2016 and for the year up to December 2016, it transported 109,272 people earning P10 million.
Figures released by Statistics Botswana last week suggest that the BR Express is still being subsidised by Botswana Rail’s goods haulage business, which raked in P289 million in 2017.
Of the 134,702 passengers who used the Blue Train last year, just above 15,000 were in sleeper class and 20, 388 in business class, with the balance in the standard class. In comparison in 2016, just 3,362 were in sleeper class, 20,666 in business class and the balance in standard class. According to the latest numbers, while goods haulage overshadowed the BR Express, the P289 million in revenue was a decline from P323 million in 2016.
Goods transported through rail declined by 25% from 2,057,402 tonnes in 2016 to 1,542,519 net tonnes in 2017. Statistics Botswana report indicated that all categories of goods traffic went down except imports from the northern part of the country, which increased by 27.1%.
Revenue from exports increased by 4.9 percent compared to the previous year while revenue from rail transported imports declined by 27.7%.
“Transportation of goods by rail depends on a lot of factors, some of these being the demand for goods in the market. Rail also faces stiff competition from transport as such it sometimes loses its customers to road transport,” reads the Statistics Botswana report.
The report further indicated that the transport sector contributed 3.5 percent to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at current prices in 2017, compared to 3.4 percent contributed in 2016.