Steering Ebusco on track: focus on design and engineering. But cash management comes first. Our interview with CEO Christian Schreyer

Christian Schreyer has been at the helm of Ebusco since September 2024. He took over the reins of a company that until then had been led by founder (and shareholder) Peter Bijvelds. The Supervisory Board of Ebusco® decided to hand over the management of the company to an outsider. A move deemed necessary in order to be able to implement a tough restructuring plan aimed at getting back on track a company whose survival was being challenged by severe liquidity problems and balance sheets in serious disarray (half 2024 financial results show EBITDA loss of €60.7 million).

A crucial challenge was played (and won) at the end of October, when Ebusco lost a court case against customer Qbuzz, which was then allowed to cancel an order for 45 buses whose delivery was coming late. However, the next day Ebusco’s shareholders adopted all resolutions to pursue the company’s restructuring, driven by a Turnaround Plan whose details, challenges and expectations are explained by Christian Schreyer in this interview with Sustainable Bus.

First (achieved) steps were the collection of 36 million euros via right issue and the partnership put in place with supplier Gotion (that became an Ebusco’s investor).

“We have been having cash issues in the last 1.5 years with disturbances in production, and the reason was a combination between external factors affecting the whole market and ‘homemade’ mistakes – that’s how Christian Schreyer sums up the recent history of Ebusco –. In 2019 Ebusco was still a well performing startup, I was in charge of Transdev Central and  Northern Europe and was one of their customers. Then the pandemic came and disrupted the supply chain between Europe and China and within Europe itself. The IPO in 2021 was successful but supply chain was already becoming an issue. Then, when the supply chain recovered, the company’s processes also in terms of procurements or parts were not under control“.

Christian Schreyer: “Ebusco has been overpromising in the past”.

Your experience revolves around the world of public transport operations. Then you have a clear view about what a customer of Ebusco would demand from a manufacturer. How is this having an influence in your decision as Ebusco’s CEO?

I know very well what customers need and know how Ebusco has been overpromising in the past. Now my job is to make realistic promises, especially in terms of timing. What I’d like to stress is that innovation is of course important, but not during production processes. If we have a project in place, the focus must be on delivering on time more than to make many little improvements anytime. We continue to collect learnings and continue to develop new products so that improvements will be integrated to the next product, not during production. 

In the last years we were not profitable but it had a lot to do with the fact that, instead of delivering buses, we built up inventory and work in progress massively. We only receive customer payments the moment you deliver the bus to the customer. This leads to the fact that if you produce a lot of inventory your PNL looks horrible, and that’s where we are now and we are working to change it.

A Turnaround Plan is in place. Where is this leading the company to?

We are not going to make any in-house assembly. We will produce composite monoparts and cascos, so part of the production is still in-house. We are focusing on engineering & design and outsourcing manufacturing processes. Plus, we will improve parts recovery and aftermarkets.

As production will not take place in the Netherlands, which activities are you going to keep in the Dutch facilities? 

Here we are keeping all the engineering and are completing some final  bus assembly projects. That  however, will be stopped at the end of Q1 in 2025. After that, we will focus on headquarter  activities, monopart casco production and Pre-Delivery Inspections. In our site in Rouen, France, we will keep some production of parts such as side walls and roof for the cascos of Ebusco 3.0. However, I want to be clear on this point, the buses will always be assembled in buses by partners, it can be in China or somewhere else. We also have a partner in Portugal. We will not do any assembling in-house after Q1 2025. And out of two facilities we have in the Netherlands, Deurne and Venray, one will be closed. 

How much capacity are you having now – and planning to have – in Rouen for casco production?

Our aim written down in the Turnaround Plan is to reach a Production run rate between 40 to 50 buses per month. In  Rouen at the moment we can realize a few cascos per week, but we will ramp up. In any case, in France we’ll produce just a part of our Ebusco 3.0’s cascos.

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