Nicolas Bargelès — It’s Wednesday February 28th 2024 at 4pm. Adrien, Romain and I are all sitting in a café in the Gare de Lyon district, in the 12th arrondissement of Paris. In a few minutes, we’ll meet at SNCF premises to discuss certain services. But before that, we have a video conference with our investment bank, which will give us the answer we’ve been awaiting for so long. It’s from the last ROSCO in the race to finance our trains, one that’s followed us since the beginning, and one whose manager has told us on numerous occasions that he absolutely wants to seal the deal. The crazy part? His children pushed him to do it - for the future, for decarbonisation, and for them.
Despite these promises, we’re preparing for a difficult negotiation. We expect the ROSCO to ask us for additional guarantees, add conditions or ask us to provide an update on the OpCo investors. But when the cafe's poor wifi connection finally allows us to speak to our advisors, the news breaks with an unpredictable brutality. It's no. The ROSCO won’t buy our trains. However, it’s the excuse used by its manager which is the most upsetting. The project hadn’t even been presented to the main shareholder of the company, because he’d already refused another passenger train project in the past, and so didn’t want to position himself on open access passenger transport. No examination, no discussion, no lively debate on the relevance of the project. Just the assumption of a refusal is enough to sweep away our funding. As a reminder, the ROSCO’s management had previously told us that it didn’t actually need to go through its shareholders to validate the investment... We end the call in a strange haze, but try to refocus immediately to go to our meeting. It's not all over yet.
Adrien Aumont — The blow is all the more difficult because the response lacks elegance. First of all, the head of the ROSCO didn’t pick up the phone to warn us. As mentioned in a previous newsletter, we had to chase him for a month to get information. All this, to only have half answers, even to this day. And ultimately we were pushed under the train, so to speak, without being given a real chance of funding. Indeed, the project that was rejected has nothing to do with us. It’s another passenger transport project in a market that’s already somewhat crowded and it needed funding values far in excess of what we need. In reality, we could even have served as a test project for this gigantic investor to position itself at lower cost on the passenger transport market. We could have helped them acquire expertise on this subject.
Romain Payet — Adrien and Nicolas probably don't remember it, but this catastrophic response came on Saint Romain's Day. It’s just a small detail, but one I’ll remember for a long time. That’s said, we still have investors and a strategic committee backing us. We have to pull ourselves together, refocus and continue to seek solutions to keep Midnight Trains alive. With the help of the investment bank, we decide to change gears by turning to a backing strategy. Or, to be more precise, to contact big groups – large tour operators, railway operators, cruise lines, airlines and sovereign funds – to offer them the opportunity to take over the project on their own. To come under their umbrella in one way or another, to expand or complete their offering as part of a diversification strategy. It’s this strategy we’re presenting to the strategic committee we’ve brought together (somewhat urgently) after the ROSCO news. Our historical investors know it as much as we do: it’s kind of a desperate strategy, but it’s still a plan that could work.
Nicolas Bargelès — We show them that there’s still a captain manning the ship and that he will be there no matter what happens. The question is whether to continue on the adventure or to return to port. But our finances enable us to stay above water until July 2024. So, cheers to that!
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