According to insiders. According to the company, strategic options are being examined.
According to information from insiders, the AUA parent company Lufthansa could start selling its credit card subsidiary AirPlus in the summer. The financial service provider for travel expense management should be put up for sale as soon as the flight bookings recovered, explained two people familiar with the process to the Reuters news agency. The sales proceeds are estimated at one billion euros.
After the lockdowns in many countries have come to an end, the time has come in the third quarter. The investment bank Goldman Sachs has been commissioned with the transaction.
Strategic options are being examined
Goldman Sachs was unavailable for comment Wednesday. A Lufthansa spokesman referred to recent statements by CFO Remco Steenbergen. He confirmed last week that the group was examining strategic options for AirPlus and the international catering business LSG.
“Sales by non-airline companies such as AirPlus are checked and assessed,” said the 2020 annual report.
Company sales
Lufthansa, which was heavily indebted after a state rescue in the Corona crisis, has to raise money through company sales. The airline group is currently still making a loss of ten million euros a day due to the pandemic, but hopes to bring up to 50 percent of the flight offer in the pre-crisis year 2019 into the air on average over the year.
AirPlus took the lead in 1989 from a spin-off from Lufthansa, employs around 1,300 people and has around 48,000 corporate customers worldwide. The company, based in Neu-Isenburg near Frankfurt, made an operating loss of 146 million euros in the virus year 2020 after two million euros in profit in the previous year. Because in the pandemic, business travel collapsed almost completely.
Slow recovery
Lufthansa assumes that, due to the companies switching to video conferencing, bookings will only recover slowly and the travel volume will still be below the level of 2019 in a few years.
