In early 2025, two new Fret SNCF companies have been created within Rail Logistics Europe (RLE), the SNCF group entity dedicated to rail freight transport and logistics. RLE is now a fully-fledged group.

Hexafret is a rail freight company specialising in wagon consolidation in France. It is capable of meeting all its customers' needs and adapting to all types of frequencies and formats (one wagon, groups of wagons, trains), facilitating access to the railways. The ambition of this new company is to encourage modal shift from road to rail and to export its unique expertise across borders by connecting France to Europe. Its raison d'être: "Acting together for accessible, responsible freight that serves the regions" is the cornerstone of its general interest mission. A spin-off from Fret SNCF, Hexafret has 4,000 employees and operates 1,100 long-distance trains a week to serve 1,300 industrial and logistics sites in France and Europe.

Thanks to its strategic location on major rail freight routes, the maintenance operator optimises the use of locomotives for all its customers: rail companies, owners and manufacturers. Technis can therefore count on the expertise of its 500 employees and their know-how acquired within Fret SNCF to ensure high-performance and accessible maintenance for its customers, Hexafret but also within the scope of RLE and, more widely, on the freight market, including outside the SNCF group.

These two new companieshave been created in accordance with the discontinuity plan set out in May 2023 by the French government, following the European Commission's investigation against the French State, which was opened in January 2023. The investigation found that Fret SNCF received illegal public aid totalling 5.3 billion euros between 2007 and 2019. Discontinuity is a legal solution requiring, among other things, that the company reduce its activity and abandon the Fret SNCF brand so as not to inherit the obligation to repay the aid in question and avoid the loss of 5,000 jobs. There is therefore a "lack of economic continuity", i.e. a "discontinuity" between the new entity and the old one. The two new companies, Hexafret and Technis, are sufficiently different from Fret SNCF not to be liable for this debt.

The aim of this transformation is to consolidate the long-term growth prospects of rail freight activities within the SNCF Group, against a backdrop of major challenges in decarbonising logistics chains. In addition, the French government has committed to paying €370 million a year from 2025 to the rail freight sector, under aid schemes notified and approved by the European Commission, designed to restore the balance of competition with road transport, which does not pay for its negative externalities (pollution, road congestion, accidents, deterioration of infrastructure, etc.).

Overall, with this aid and a commercial strategy of winning new markets, Hexafret and Technis are aiming for a combined turnover of more than €700M in 2025, comparable to that achieved by Fret SNCF in 2023, before the impact of the discontinuity.