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  • Railway company head Matthew Rose said America’s food-basket-to-the-world dynamic coupled with expanding Asian markets will help carry the freight for American farm products. John Cross

    Bullish

February 8, 2010

Rail leader reports growing Asian market

By Brian Ojanpa The Free Press

MANKATO — Though the recession roiled the rail industry in 2009, the head of a Texas-based railway company is bullish about its Asia-enhanced future.

“China is the next big thing in our industry,” Matthew Rose told attendees Monday at the Minnesota Grain and Feed Association convention in Verizon Wireless Center.

Rose, president and CEO of Burlington, Northern Santa Fe Railway, said two of the most prominent issues impacting the future of agriculture are America’s expanding role in providing the world’s food supply and Asia’s economic growth.

“Asians’ increased incomes have led to a growing demand for food products,” he said. “They’re able to purchase more products and consume more complex products.”

Rose said by 2014 most of China’s population will live in urban areas, a tremendous demographic shift from even a decade ago.

And the rail company has been ramping up to meet that demand for agricultural products, which comprise 11 percent of its total freight business.

Rose said the company bought 357 locomotives in 2009 and in the past decade has purchased 2,500.

The company shipped about 200,000 carloads of agricultural products out of Minnesota in 2009.

Rose said energy costs — company trains burn 1.4 billion gallons of oil a year — will continue to have a salient impact on the rail industry. But he also is solidly optimistic about the nation’s economic rebound.

“We know the economy is going to recover.”

Rose, 49, ascended quickly in the management ranks of Burlington, Northern Santa Fe and became its CEO in 2002.

The railroad’s 2008 profit went up 16 percent despite weaker freight demand, and revenue was $18.02 billion, up 14 percent from the year before.

Business Week magazine calculated Rose’s total compensation package for the past fiscal year at more than $15 million.     

 

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