Status: 01/25/2022 08:59 a.m
The shipping company MSC wants to take over the airline ITA with Lufthansa as a partner. The interest of the Germans in the Italian airline is apparently aimed at the European flight network.
The shipping company MSC, together with its partner Lufthansa, wants to join the airline ITA, which emerged from the insolvent Italian airline Alitalia. The three companies involved confirmed the plans. According to its own statements, ITA yesterday evening “received an expression of interest from the MSC Group and Lufthansa in order to acquire a majority stake in ITA Airways,” according to the Italian company.
After that, Lufthansa and MSC want “the Italian government to retain a minority stake in the company.” According to the ITA, MSC and Lufthansa require 90 working days for exclusive discussions about a possible deal. The ITA Board of Directors will review the details of the expression of interest at an upcoming meeting, it said.
Long search for an investor
After the insolvency of the predecessor company Alitalia, ITA is 100 percent owned by the Italian state. Rome got involved with Alitalia in 2017, but did not find an investor for the airline for a long time. The company’s economic situation was exacerbated by the corona pandemic.
The shipping company MSC, which has Italian roots, also confirmed the information provided by ITA Airways. The company has “expressed its interest in acquiring a controlling stake” in the airline “to the Italian government,” it said. And Lufthansa has also accepted the offer: “We are the potential commercial partner of MSC,” confirmed a Lufthansa spokesman.
Interested in feeder flights
Through the partnership with MSC, Lufthansa could, according to the news agency Reuters become a partner of ITA without your own investment and without any financial risk. Lufthansa had been interested in joining ITA for a long time, but a first attempt at the beginning of 2020 failed. Lufthansa boss Carsten Spohr had ruled out a share purchase in November.
The Italian market is considered difficult in the industry. According to aviation experts, domestic flights and European connections are highly competitive, as there are many fast train connections on the mainland and the low-cost airlines Ryanair and Wizz occupy many European routes. For Lufthansa, the goal of joining ITA should be primarily to get feeder flights to its own hubs in Frankfurt, Munich or Zurich. A “commercial partnership” is sufficient for this, as it is now planned. With it, “sales can be brought in without additional costs,” according to Kepler Cheuvreux analyst Ruxandra Haradau-Doser.