Eurotunnel, the cross-channel shuttle operator, today declared its first profit in its 20-year history.

Groupe Eurotunnel, the French company formed last year after a huge restructuring of its mammoth debt, said it had earned a pro forma net €1m (£800,000) in 2007.

Jacques Gounon, the chairman and chief executive, said: "2007 shows that the new [group] is nothing like the old...The results are due to remarkable levels of performance and to strict management of operating costs. They also benefit from the massive reduction in debt achieved through the financial restructuring."

Eurotunnel has also gained from a substantial increase in traffic between Britain and the Continent, contributing to a 15% jump in first-quarter revenues this year to €187.6m.

Gounon said: "Now that we finally have the high-speed [rail] link in Britain, we are getting the passenger numbers we should have had 15 years ago." Eurostar, the train operator, has cut journey times from the revamped St Pancras in London to Brussels to under two hours.

Last year passenger shuttles rose 11% to 454,076 cars, and truck shuttles by 10% to 385,145 trucks, with revenues up 6% on a like-for-like basis at €775m.

But, in absolute terms, they fell 6% from €823m in 2006 because of the ending in November that year of government guarantees for minimum revenue for passenger and freight shuttles that brought in €95m.

The tunnel, launched by Margaret Thatcher and the former French president François Mitterrand in the 1980s, struggled to compete with the rise of low-cost airlines when it first launched services in 1994.

It ran up huge debt, resulting in a series of painful restructurings and the loss of hundreds of jobs due to automated passenger check-in. The debt crisis, in which Eurotunnel suspended payments during a safeguard period, ended last year in a deal between creditors and angry shareholders brokered by Goldman Sachs. It halved the debt and rescued the original company from bankruptcy.

This produced an exceptional pro forma net profit last year of €3.324bn, while operating earnings rose 12% to €439m, €50m ahead of forecasts. Gounon said the company could beat its 2010 earnings forecast of €500m.