2026 WILL BRING INTENSIVE TIMES: INNOVATION AND DIGITALISATION PRESSURE PAIRED WITH GEOPOLITICAL UNCERTAINTIES AND BLEAK OUTLOOKS
SCI RAILINDEX IV/2025
Hamburg. The order books are still well filled, but optimism is declining, with hardly anyone expecting an improvement. At minus 4 points, the SCI Rail Index reflects the low mood in the railway industry like a barometer. "The current situation is better than the mood. But uncertainties are becoming more entrenched, and geopolitical crises with an increasingly harsh rhetoric are slowing down investments and joy for innovation. The railway industry is facing major chal-lenges under difficult conditions. We are seeing declining growth rates in new business, and instead we are witnessing growth in after-sales in many areas and a clear trend towards new networked business models," says Maria Leenen, CEO of SCI Verkehr. Trade conflicts, partic-ularly between the major railway regions of North America, China and Europe, are having an impact on the industry. As a result, the realignment of supply chains is the industry's second major strategic goal after digitalisation.
The SCI GLOBAL RAIL INDEX is based on approximately 100 reports from representative companies in the global rail industry. The companies are regularly asked to assess their current business situation and their expectations for the coming three months. They can indicate their situation as "good", "satisfactory" or "poor" and their business expectations for the coming six months as "more favourable", "stable" or "less favourable". The balance value of the current business situation is the difference between the percentages of the answers "good" and "bad", the balance value of the expectations is the difference between the percentages of the answers "more favourable" and "less favourable". The business climate is a transformed mean value from the balances of the business situation and the expectations.
