- While business and profits will return when the sociopolitical situation stabilises, the problems arising from mismanagement will not go away by themselves
The management culture of the MTR Corporation has once again come under the spotlight following investigations into one of the worst mishaps involving the city's trains. It was found that the derailment that injured eight passengers last September had nothing to do with vandalism, a problem that gripped the city during the height of the civil unrest last year. The accident was in fact caused by poor work maintenance, according to an internal probe.
The revelation has prompted calls for transport minister Frank Chan Fan, who said he would not rule out any possible causes back then, to apologise. More importantly, it has once again called into question the MTR's corporate culture and government supervision.
It was sheer luck that the morning rush hour incident did not end up as a fatal tragedy. At least three carriages came off the track when an East Rail southbound train approached Hung Hom station. A report released last Tuesday said the maintenance team had made flawed judgments when fixing the track gauge and did not follow the protocol to follow up the works and compile reports to management.
This is not the first time the city's rail operator has been hit with substandard works. A raft of engineering and management woes were exposed during the construction of the cross-border high-speed railway and the Sha Tin-Central link. Coincidentally, it was confirmed that the cost of the latter had spiralled to nearly HK$91 billion, excluding another HK$1.37 billion project management cost that is still a subject of dispute between the MTR and government, the company's main shareholder.
The civil unrest last year has dealt the MTR a heavy blow, with its profits from recurrent business plunging 44.8 per cent to HK$4.98 billion in 2019. The impact has further deepened in the wake of the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, costing at least HK$1.3 billion over the past two months. The repeated bad news does nothing for what was once reputed as a world-class rail operator. While business and profits will return when the sociopolitical situation stabilises, the problems arising from mismanagement will not go away by themselves. A serious overhaul of the corporate culture is warranted to prevent more scandals and mishaps.
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