Stadler and Salvador Caetano create train factory in Portugal

Unit for the construction of trains will appear in Ovar. The project contributes to the creation of qualified jobs in this region.

Salvador Caetano and Stadler signed a strategic alliance for the creation of a railway vehicle factory in the city of Ovar, located in the district of Aveiro, which aims to revolutionize the area of ​​mobility in Portugal.

The main objective of the future investment is the production, among others, of the 117 trains, which are planned within the scope of a public tender that Comboios de Portugal (CP) launched in 2021.

This investment will be complemented with the construction of a maintenance workshop in Guifões, in the district of Porto.

Stadler and Salvador Caetano have mutual interests in the mobility sector and are united by a business vision oriented towards quality, excellence, innovation and sustainability, which facilitated the materialization of this strategic alliance.

The Salvador Caetano Group, with a turnover of 2.9 billion euros in 2022, present in 41 countries and 3 continents, will achieve through this partnership a greater diversification of its lines of business, entering the sector of the production of railway vehicles.

In this way, it now joins the railway sector to its long industrial activity in the areas of automobile production, buses and aeronautics; automotive distribution; flexible mobility services; as well as the development of electric mobility solutions, including hydrogen.

Paradigm change

The railway industry is one of the industries with the best long-term prospects given the importance of railways in future mobility, making a sustained contribution to achieving the decarbonisation objectives set by the European Union, which aim at climate neutrality by 2050 .

The agreement will give a considerable boost to the Portuguese railway industry, which currently does not have any train factory, accelerating the participation of Portuguese companies in the supply of components for other industrial sectors.

Stadler, which achieved a turnover of CHF 3.8 billion in 2022, will add this factory to the Division responsible for the Iberian Peninsula, thus consolidating its presence in Portugal.

It is recalled that in November 2020, CP and Stadler signed a contract to design and build 22 regional trains of the FLIRT model. The agreement includes 10 electric carriages, 12 bimodal units, maintenance service for a minimum of 4 years, as well as the provision of training services. The contract assumes the renewal of the regional rail fleet and was part of the Portuguese operator’s rolling stock renewal plan.

In May 2021, Metropolitano de Lisboa purchased 14 Meters of 3 carriages from Stadler, an order that also included preventive and corrective maintenance of all equipment during the first three years of the project, as well as the supply of spare parts and spare parts. to the fleet for another two years.

In the same year, in November, Stadler signed a contract with the freight rail operator Medway, for the purchase of 16 EURO6000 interoperable electric and dual voltage locomotives, with the highest traction capacity available on the market.

The president of Stadler, Peter Spuhler, stated after signing the agreement that he was “convinced that the alliance with one of the most important companies in Portugal substantially improves our proposal for the supply of new trains to CP. Salvador Caetano is, without a doubt, the best possible ally to achieve our objective”.

For Miguel Ramos, CEO of Salvador Caetano, “this strategic agreement is an opportunity for the Group to make a decisive contribution to the renewal and upgrading of the railway industry in Portugal, as a reference in the development of new sustainable mobility solutions”.