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Lufthansa AG: Federal government reduces stake

2021-08-16T08:11:24.070Z


With nine billion euros, the taxpayer saved Lufthansa, which was in distress due to the Corona crisis. In return, the federal government received a 20 percent stake in the airline. Now he wants to sell part of the block of shares again.


Enlarge image

Finally more in the air than on the ground:

Lufthansa made more money than it spent in the past quarter

Photo: © Ralph Orlowski / Reuters / REUTERS

The federal government wants to sell part of its stake in Lufthansa in the next few weeks. "Against the background of the (...) positive corporate development", the Economic Stabilization Fund (WSF) will reduce its stake of 20 percent by a maximum of a quarter, the German Finance Agency announced on Monday. Sales should start on Monday. The share last fell around 1 percent in early trading on Monday.

The federal government had acquired the stake as part of a billion-dollar support campaign for the airline, which got into trouble during the Corona crisis, for 300 million euros.

This means that the German state is the main shareholder.

The package is now worth more than a billion euros on the stock exchange.

In total, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Belgium had promised the group nine billion euros in support.

Lufthansa has called up four billion euros of this so far.

The state aid will soon be replaced with a capital increase.

Capital increase: Lufthansa wants to replace state aid as soon as possible

The WSF was set up to help important companies get over the corona crisis. "After the first successes of the future-oriented measures introduced by Deutsche Lufthansa, the WSF is adjusting its level of participation in a targeted manner, taking into account the interests of both sides," said the announcement. "As part of the existing stabilization measures, the WSF will continue to support Deutsche Lufthansa in line with its position as a major shareholder."

In the past quarter, Lufthansa had for the first time since the beginning of the Corona crisis received more money than it spent.

Thanks to strong bookings and cost reductions, the group was able to stop the outflow of funds and took in 340 million euros in cash.

In the second quarter, the adjusted operating result was minus 952 million euros - that was significantly less than in the same quarter of the previous year, when the corona lockdown caused a deficit of 1.7 billion euros.

Revenue rose by 70 percent to 3.2 billion euros, but remained far below the level of normal times when Lufthansa had flown in almost ten billion euros in revenue.

The corona crisis hit air traffic hard.

It was not until May that more passenger planes began to take off again with the easing of travel restrictions.

mg / Reuters

Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2021-08-16

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