The market-leading rail freight company will transport 250 thousand tonnes of sugar beet to Hungary's only sugar factory by the end of December. RCH will forward the raw material by train, the remaining roughly 40% will be transported on road.
This year, Hungarian farmers sowed 8.7 thousand hectares of sugar beets for the factory, less than last year. However, the drought has resulted in a lower average crop yield, which is estimated to be at an average of 50-52 tonnes per hectare, well below the level of previous years, although expectedly with a higher sugar content of the beet than the years before.
100 thousand kilometres
Due to the weaker harvest, the factory also buys sugar beet from abroad; in addition to the local fields, raw material is also procured from Slovakian sugar beet fields. It is not uncommon for trains of Rail Cargo Hungaria to transport harvested material from more than 500 kilometres away, for example from the vicinity of Veľká Ida and Zemplínská Nová Ves in Slovakia. During the planned 90 days of the campaign, the company's trains will cover more than 100 thousand kilometres, with an average of three sugar beet trains running on the rail network per day.
During the campaign, the sugar factory plans to process an average of 4500-5000 tonnes of sugar beet per day. Considering the high energy prices on the market, Magyar Cukor plans to cover the energy needs of the production mainly from its own sources.
High-quality logistics solutions
The extremely rapid and unpredictable increase in the price of traction power drastically worsens the competitiveness of rail freight transport compared to road traffic. This circumstance has also posed a massive challenge to RCH, which fulfils its transport tasks by applying high-quality organisational logistics approaches. Due to RCH’s decades of experience in the field of the transport of Hungarian sugar beet by rail and the efficient technical cooperation with the factory in Kaposvár, Magyar Cukor assigned the internal railway operations to the company as well in addition to the transport service.