Italy Transporto Aero
Lufthansa wants to take over the successor to Alitalia with a strong partner MSC
The first Alitalia aircraft to now fly the colors of Italia Trasporto Aereo (ITA).
© Imago Images
After a series of bankruptcies and rescue attempts at the predecessor Alitalia, a future is emerging for Italy’s state airline ITA. The Lufthansa Group is on board, but wants to minimize its economic risk.
With a strong partner, Lufthansa is on course for the long-cherished goal of Italy. Together with the large container and cruise line MSC from Geneva, Europe’s top-selling aviation group is aiming for a majority takeover of Alitalia’s successor ITA Airways, as all parties involved have confirmed.
Above all, it is necessary to speak to the Italian state, which fully owns the ITA. MSC and Lufthansa have agreed to a period of 90 working days for the takeover negotiations. According to Alfredo Altavilla, President of the ITA Board of Directors, the shipping company MSC intends to take over the majority.
The fact that Lufthansa, recently rescued by the state, is considering investing with its own capital, as the MDax group explained, is a reversal. Even after the German state aid had been repaid, Lufthansa boss Carsten Spohr emphasized that they were only looking for a “commercial partnership”. The details are to be negotiated based on the exact ITA company data in the coming weeks. It is clear that the Italian state wants to stay on board as a minority shareholder.
The ITA, which has been active in the sky since October 2021, has been neatly spruced up after several bankruptcies and billions in support from its predecessor Alitalia. Only 2,800 of the 11,000 employees who were once quite willing to go on strike are still on board, the Airbus fleet of currently 52 aircraft is to be extensively renewed and expanded to 105 jets despite the Corona lull. ITA would then be larger than the largest Lufthansa subsidiary, Swiss. The renovator Altavilla told the “Handelsblatt” that it was already a great success to have aroused the interest of a “big company like Lufthansa and a big group like MSC in so few months.”
Should there be a takeover, the new owners will insist on integrating ITA into the Star Alliance, which is dominated by Lufthansa, and on directing transfer passengers to their own hubs such as Frankfurt, Munich or Zurich. So far, the Italians are represented in the Air France-KLM SkyTeam.
“Of course the Italian market is highly lucrative”
Italy has long been a country of longing for Lufthansa, and Alitalia has repeatedly sought cooperation and partial takeovers. The market south of the Alps is one of the strongest in terms of turnover in Europe, with a strong tourist business and close ties to North America. Spohr’s predecessor, Wolfgang Mayrhuber, had already tried in 2009 to establish the newly founded “Lufthansa Italia” against Alitalia, which had just been privatized at the time. After high losses, only the Lufthansa subsidiary Air Dolomiti remained in Italy in 2011, where Ryanair and Wizz Air now dominate events.
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“Of course, the Italian market is highly lucrative. And since Italy will never do without its own airline, the takeover is a step in the right direction,” says Gerald Wissel from the aviation consultancy Airborne. At the same time, he warns of old and new problems. The influence of the Italian trade unions must be permanently limited and the Lufthansa Group’s sprawling hub system must be reorganized. “You should look at Rome together with Vienna, Munich and Brussels.”
Container giant MSC
For those responsible in Rome, the offer from Lufthansa and the MSC shipping company with its Italian roots seems to be very tempting. The industrial logic of the offer is “very convincing” and “extremely interesting”, Altavilla has already distributed plenty of advance praise. In addition to around three million MSC cruise passengers as potential customers, he also sees opportunities in the cargo sector: “Today, cargo is the sector in which the highest profit margins are achieved.”
The industry giants in the shipping industry are competing for takeover targets with bulging coffers. The very expansive Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), founded in 1970 by the Italian Gianluigi Aponte, has just ousted its competitor Maersk from first place in terms of offered freight capacity after decades. Aponte was already part of a consortium of shareholders to rescue Alitalia in 2008, but soon left the alliance forged by Silvio Berlusconi.
“Your goals are diverse and show the ambition to gain more influence on the global supply chains,” write the analysts of the management consultancy PwC in a recent study on the mega shipping companies. In addition to investments in the core business of shipping and in port terminals, shipping companies are also increasingly buying “forwarders in order to gain direct access to the shippers”. Even airlines don’t fit in badly, as the French CMA CGM shows.
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