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The Lufthansa staff has to cope with a tough austerity course - but other aviation groups are even worse off
Photo: Andreas Arnold / DPA
Lufthansa is only offering a fifth of the capacity in the current quarter.
The strong cargo business can only partially compensate for the lack of passengers, especially on the lucrative transatlantic routes: In 2020, sales fell by more than half.
The state-backed airline continues to burn cash regularly, just not as quickly as before - and CEO
Carsten Spohr
(54) is preparing for the weakness of the aviation business to continue for years.
The proud crane has flown out of the Dax.
Can it get any worse?
Yes it can.
This shows the comparison with other large aviation groups in Europe.
The Corona crisis hits them all hard - but not all equally.
Air France-KLM: The state has to do it again
The situation at Air France-KLM is particularly desperate, after a record loss of more than seven billion euros.
The Lufthansa competitor is proud to have ramped up business noticeably again.
With around half the capacity of the previous year, the company is above the industry average and well ahead of "Competitor 1" and "Competitor 2" (meaning Lufthansa and the British Airways / Iberia parent company IAG) - "thanks to a balanced route network, less dependent on North America ", as it is called in an investor presentation.
Especially the routes to French overseas territories are less sensitive to travel bans.
Only: Permitted flights are far from being profitable flights.
In the fourth quarter, the group burned another 2.6 billion euros in cash.
While Lufthansa was able to put aside the threat of a second state rescue with several bond issues, Air France boss
Ben Smith
(49) is banking on exactly that - with an envious look at Frankfurt: "We urge that the aid be appropriate and comparable to that for the Lufthansa is ", he said, and" we hope to reach an agreement at short notice ".
That was in mid-February, after months of negotiations with the EU, the French and the Dutch governments, which almost two decades after the merger are still paying attention to national proportional representation in favor of KLM.
To date, there has obviously been no breakthrough.
IAG: More losses than sales
The other large European aviation group IAG (British Airways, Iberia, Aer Lingus, Level, Vueling) has stopped its loud criticism of state aid for other airlines at the beginning of the Corona crisis.
Most recently, the company gratefully accepted a British export aid loan of two billion pounds.
Together with a € 2.75 billion capital increase in the fall (supported by the main state shareholder, Qatar Airways), the liquidity cushion has grown to more than € 10 billion.
The new IAG boss
Luis Gallego will
probably need that too.
The cash burn is similar to that of the French, only when business has shrunk significantly.
The return on sales of minus 88.7 percent is even more negative than at Air France-KLM (minus 63.9 percent) and Lufthansa (minus 50.8 percent until September).
Before taxes, the loss was even greater than the sales.
The group does not dare to look ahead, it just remains to hold out.
After all, the acute existential threat to the group has survived: Despite its headquarters in London, the IAG was able to save its status as a European company via Brexit.
Otherwise, in the worst case, she would even have had to apply for new flight licenses in the EU for her Spanish and Irish daughters.
Turkish Airlines: The grace of geography
Currently, competition with airlines from the edge of the continent hardly plays a role anymore due to the lack of long-haul flights.
But for the time after Corona, the Middle Eastern carriers and above all Turkish Airlines - Lufthansa partner in the Star Alliance - are positioning themselves as rivals for the business of the future.
The mega airport in Istanbul, designed for 200 million passengers, which is grotesquely oversized from today's perspective, is the ideal hub for connecting most flight destinations in Europe, Asia and Africa in a short time.
The base in Turkey also helps in the Corona crisis: the business with domestic flights and the connections of Turkish migrants home are much more stable than the tourist business or business trips within the EU.
The fact that
Turkish Airlines, managed
by
Bilal Ekşi
, lost less than half of its revenue in 2020 and had to post a comparatively moderate 12.4 percent of it as a loss, was due to the same success factor as with the competition: the cargo business, previously insignificant for the Turks, grew strongly and recently contributed almost as much to the revenue as the passengers.
Ryanair: Historical purge
For the Irish low-cost airline, cargo is only considered ballast, the lean business is designed entirely for tourists, and they are not allowed to travel: No wonder that the pure traffic and sales figures of Ryanair look even more catastrophic than those of its broader competitors.
In February, the travel statistics were 95 percent below the previous year - not much flies.
Most recently, the forecast was lowered again: Instead of more than 150 million passengers as in the calendar year 2019, the Irish are expecting only 26 to 30 million in the financial year running until March 31, "with a higher risk towards the lower end of the range".
Nevertheless, the rustic permanent CEO
Michael O'Leary
(59) basks in success again.
The costs could be reduced almost as quickly as the proceeds, and the remaining loophole was helped by milder forms of state aid, which Ryanair has (unsuccessfully) combated in court to this day: the Irish took a large loan with a British state guarantee, and short-time allowance from various EU States too, of course.
Now, despite lockdowns, the airline sees itself in a position to repay billions in debt in the first half of the year.
The rhetoric, shaped last spring by the victim role against the "drunken uncle" Lufthansa, who slurps government aid out of all glasses and makes competition impossible, is the old one again: "In my 30 years in the industry, I've never had such a cleansing experienced ", exulted O'Leary opposite the" Financial Times ".
Competitors would cut seats for 100 million passengers in the coming months.
"Someone has to come and take this capacity" - and that someone will be Ryanair, now with an even lower cost base and a stronger balance sheet.
It doesn't really matter when the flight business really starts again.
ak