Palla No Longer Wants Overarching Group Programs

Palla No Longer Wants Overarching Group Programs

11.12.2025

DB CEO Evelyn Palla today presented concrete measures for the "Railway Restart" (Neustart Bahn), a reorganization within the DB Group. Various organizational changes will take effect as early as January 1, 2026, as the DB Supervisory Board decided yesterday (10.12.2025). As was already partially known (Rail Business of 05.12.2025), DB intends to eliminate an entire intermediate management level below the Group Executive Board and reduce the first management level below that from 43 to 22 organizational units. Overall, according to Palla, the goal is to reduce approximately 30% of the 3,500 positions in the governance functions of the DB AG holding company.

Regarding decentralization, she announced that DB AG will no longer launch company-wide group programs in the future. The current restructuring program "S3" will end on 31.12.2025. Instead, responsibility for efficiency and quality will lie directly within the "line management for the business units." This is intended to avoid existing parallel and potentially even conflicting incentives between strategies within the business units and those originating from the central headquarters. Nevertheless, there will be a function "for quality control" attached to Palla, which coordinates at the Group level to ensure that the measures are sufficient to achieve the Group's economic and quality goals—Palla mentioned, for instance, 60% punctuality in long-distance traffic in 2026.

At DB InfraGo, driving and construction (Fahren und Bauen) are to be re-bundled under a single responsible entity at all levels—both on the Group Executive Board and in the network regions—to ensure better coordination of track closures and operations for all railway undertaking companies.