MUNICIPAL BUS COMPANY RUNNING AT HEAVY LOSS

Maputo’s publicly owned municipal bus company, EMTPM, made a loss of over 174 million meticais (about 5.5 million US dollars, at current exchange rates) in 2013, according to the company’s report and accounts for that year, published this week.This result was a dramatic shift in fortune, since in 2010 EMTPM had run at a profit of slightly more than 98 million meticais.The main problem faced by the company has been a sharp fall in the number of passengers. In 2012 the company’s buses carried 41.9 million passengers, but in 2013 this figure slumped to 21.4 million, a decline of 49 per cent.EMTPM blames this on the congested Maputo roads, which slow the buses down, so that they made fewer journeys in 2013 than in 2012. The average daily number of journeys fell by 32.7 per cent and the distance travelled by 36.5 per cent.The company has also faced irregular supplies of spare parts, particularly for buses of the Indian mark Tata. This was due both to EMTPM’s financial difficulties and to the failure by some suppliers to meet deadlines. In particular, the company that won the tender to supply tyres, provided them late.56 per cent of the buses are from Tata, and the report describes them as “fragile”. Their constant breakdowns have a severe impact on the company’s productivity. The rest of the operational fleet come from Volkswagen (26 per cent) and from the Chinese company Yutong (18 per cent).At the end of 2013, EMTPM had 349 buses, of which 258 were operational and 89 were off the roads. During the year the company had hoped to recover 45 of the buses that were out of order, but only managed to repair 14 of them. The total number of buses in operation rose slightly – from 256 in 2012 to 258 in 2013.EMTPM does not hold out much hope of recovering the other 89 buses. The report states that repairing them “is not viable, in most cases, due to their advanced state of decay”.