Freight-policy - Camrail

FREIGHT POLICY

CAMRAIL, leader in multimodal overland freight transport in Cameroon and the sub-region, applies a commercial policy based on a massification offer, with competitive rates. In particular, this policy aims to support major projects with high added value, as well as to connect the coast and the hinterland.

Railways solutions

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Since the start-up of the concession, the freight market has accounted for the bulk of CAMRAIL's sales (between 80% and 85% of activity over the period). In terms of freight, CAMRAIL operates on the national market and the hinterland.

Logistics platforms

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The national market, which mainly involves :

the transport of hydrocarbons from Douala to 3 main depots located in Yaoundé, Bélabo and Ngaoundéré;

consumer goods demanded in areas accessible by rail with links between Douala and Yaoundé, in the North and East of Cameroon;

and products from the national primary sector, consisting of cotton fiber, logs and lumber for export.

Hinterland markets on the Douala-Chad corridor, which is predominant, and the Douala-CAR corridor, which is more marginal (container and conventional imports, cotton exports, etc.). The rail network extends as far as Ngaoundéré, and requires multimodal transport to serve Chad, northern Cameroon and CAR.

On a purely economic level, CAMRAIL participates in the supply of towns and villages in the country and in the sub-region, while contributing to the opening up of villages whose only access remains by rail. To all this, we must add a very important aspect which is that of the development and modernization of the railway network thanks in particular to consistent investment policies.

We are developing a merchandise sales policy based on flexible, highly competitive pricing, which enables us to support large-scale, high value-added projects.

Performance

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Freight transport in Cameroon since the concessioning of the rail network has evolved in 3 phases: a phase of accelerated growth between 1999 and 2002, driven by the concessioning and construction of the Chad-Cameroon pipeline; a phase of stabilization between 2003 and 2013; a phase of regression since 2014.

The progress made since the concession was granted has been significant: tonnages transported, which peaked at between 1.1 and 1.4 million tones in the 1990s, increased significantly with the creation of CAMRAIL in 1999, reaching 1.9 million tones in 2001-2002.

The Douala rail corridor, which used to play an important role in supplying Chad, has benefited fully from the development of the Chadian oil industry, and in particular from the construction of the pipeline linking Doba to Kribi.

We also played an essential role in the delivery of humanitarian aid shipments to Darfur (WFP, UNHCR, etc.).

Until 2003 and 2004, years marked by the dynamism of the Chadian economy driven by the development of oil extraction infrastructure and equipment, transported tonnages rose to over 1.8 million tones.

Freight traffic stabilized between 2004 and 2013. We succeeded in substituting Chad's current imports for the heavy equipment used by the national oil industry and benefited from the very strong growth of the Chadian economy (GDP per capita, which was $220 in 2001, reached $1,025 in 2014).

During these years, CAMRAIL was the public railroad in West and Central Sub-Saharan Africa that carried the heaviest tonnages.

Since 2013-2014, traffic measured in tonne-km has fallen steadily. Over these years, we have been subjected to a double pressure on our market. On the one hand, the improvement in the quality of the road network marked by the asphalting of the last stretch of road linking Douala to Ngaoundéré in 2012, which led to a sharp increase in road competition. On the other hand, the Chadian economic crisis in 2015 led to a sharp drop in national imports in both conventional and containerized form (33% and 48% drop in market volumes respectively).

The scale of the decline suffered by the Chadian economy can also be gauged by the sharp reduction in tonnages unloaded at the Port of Douala bound for Chad (366,317 T in 2017 versus 610,114 T in 2014 and 584,040 T in 2015).

Having managed to maintain our level of activity until 2015, we suffered a 16% drop in transported tonnages over the following two years; we nevertheless managed to partially offset the impact of the Chadian crisis by relying on the products that Chad transports to the Cameroonian domestic market, notably hydrocarbons, export timber and local conventional traffic. We have also agreed to lower prices (-30% on certain generics) in an attempt to safeguard its market share.

FREIGHT POLICY

FREIGHT POLICY

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