Lufthansa has been in the black for the first time since the beginning of the corona pandemic. For the third quarter, the aviation group reports an adjusted operating profit of 17 million euros. The company is benefiting from a stronger demand for air travel and now also from the opening of the USA to all travelers. The Lufthansa Cargo division is more profitable than ever before. In addition, the subsidiaries’ savings programs are effective. In the first nine months, however, there was still an operating loss of 2.1 billion euros, half as high as in the previous year.
“With the increasing demand for business travel and a record result at Lufthansa Cargo, we were able to master another milestone on our way out of the crisis, the return to the black,” said CEO Carsten Spohr. In the third quarter, the airline flew around twice as much capacity as in the second quarter. However, this is still only around half of what was available before the pandemic. Lufthansa intends to repay the rest of the silent contributions from the Economic Stabilization Fund (WSF) by the end of the year.
Bookings on routes to North America stimulate sales
According to Spohr, Lufthansa has recently benefited from two effects in terms of revenue: In general, after the relatively good holiday business, business travelers have now also returned. In addition, the strong advance bookings on the North America routes are noticeable. Passengers will not be allowed to enter the country until next Monday without a special permit, but the advance bookings have already resulted in huge leaps in sales in recent weeks. In normal times, Lufthansa makes a large part of its profits in the North Atlantic business, which is why opening up is so important for them.
The Group’s classic airlines – Lufthansa, Swiss, Austrian and Brussels Airlines – nevertheless made a total loss of 450 million euros. This was almost offset by Lufthansa Cargo (301 million profit) and, of all things, the low-cost division Eurowings. After this had always shown high losses in the years before the Corona crisis, the low-cost offshoot has apparently turned around: in the third quarter, Eurowings achieved an adjusted operating profit of 108 million euros, in the previous year it was still a loss in the same amount. Overall, Lufthansa wants to fly profitably again next year.
On the other hand, Lufthansa is apparently making good progress in terms of costs. By 2024, these are expected to fall structurally by 3.5 billion euros, but 2.5 billion of them have already been implemented. 4,000 employees have resigned on the basis of volunteer programs since the beginning of the year; there are fixed agreements for a further 3,000. Mathematically, according to Lufthansa, there is still an excess of 3,000 employees – around a third of them with the pilots of the core brand, with whom the company has not yet agreed on savings. Spohr is sticking to the goal of keeping more than 100,000 of the 140,000 employees. At the end of September there were 107,000. The group is considering relocating four long-haul aircraft from Frankfurt to Munich.