Airberlin‘s (Berlin) CEO Hartmut Mehdorn has reacted with sharp criticism to the announcement that the
new Berlin-Brandenburg Airport (BER) will be delayed until March 17, 2013. The company issued the following statement:

“This is totally unacceptable and does almost irreparable and therefore intolerable reputational damage to Berlin as an airport hub. The flight schedule with the planned long-haul destinations which were to start in winter can scarcely be implemented. The same applies to additional planned destinations overseas. With much difficulty, we would have accepted the BER postponement to October; this would have been possible only with great effort and expenditure. But this latest decision will have a deep impact on the business operations of the market leader.

We have promised to provide our passengers, our oneworld® alliance and our strategic partner Etihad Airways with good service even during the transition in Berlin. This has now been postponed indefinitely. Instead, we must continue with the much too small, completely inappropriate Tegel Airport. The postponement hits Airberlin a lot harder than the other airlines that fly to Berlin. Airberlin, with a market share of around 33 percent, is the only airline with a hub and thus a growing number of connecting passengers in Berlin. The proportion of connecting passengers last summer reached 23 percent. The planned construction of a hub, wherein six daily waves of Airberlin planes could approach Berlin from all directions and passengers could quickly transfer and continue flying, was tailored to BER and is hardly feasible at Tegel.

The postponement of the opening by several months is no longer explicable purely based on fire protection measures. As a result, we incur not only an economic loss but also damage to our hub’s image, which is financially incalculable.”

In other news, the company has unveiled a new football (soccer) logo (see picture below).

On the financial side, Airberlin reported a net loss of $132 million in the first quarter of 2012. The airline issued this statement:

Germany’s second largest airline can draw positive conclusions from its first quarter of 2012. On presenting Airberlin’s interim report, CEO Hartmut Mehdorn announced: “Although it’s too early to celebrate, we can clearly see our “Shape and Size” program beginning to produce results – we’re starting to step up our efficiency and reap the benefit of lower costs ahead of our competition. And as a result, nearly all the indicators of significance for our business are pointing in the right direction.”

Despite systematically reducing capacity by 10.5%, it has been possible to increase sales figures in the traditionally hardest quarter for the German airline industry by 4% to 812.9 million euros (781.6 million euros) compared with the same quarter of the previous year. Capacity utilization went up by 3.9 percentage points to 76.4% (72.5%). These are the best results recorded for the first quarter since airberlin was listed on the stock exchange. Yield (income per passenger) rose by 7.3% to 109.8 euros (102.4 euros). EBITDAR (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, Amortisation and Rent) improved by 128% to 7.2 million euros (-25.7 euros), EBIT (Earnings Before Interest and Taxes) went up 20.7% to -149.3 million euros ( 188.3 million euros), and net loss went down by 14.6% to -102.9 million euros (-120.6 million euros).

“Although costs for fuel have gone up to 35.2 million euros and for aviation tax to 4.2 million euros, we’ve managed to improve EBIT by nearly 40 million euros”, announced airberlin CFO Ulf Hüttmeyer. The following conclusions can clearly be drawn from this: Everyone in the company has understood that our efficiency program is the number one task for management. Despite systematically reducing capacity by more than 10%, passenger numbers have only gone down by 5.8% to 6.5 million. As Hüttmeyer explains: “Our results show that the number of passengers on its own bears almost no relevance to profitability – it’s much more important to ensure that capacity on our aircraft is fully utilised.”

Mehdorn again called for aviation tax to be abolished: “It puts German airlines at an unfair disadvantage in an international arena that is already difficult.”

Top Copyright Photo: Ton Jochems.

Airberlin Slide Show: CLICK HERE

Bottom Copyright Photo: Javier Rodriguez. Airberlin has applied special decals to its Boeing 737-86J D-ABMB (msn 36121) to celebrate the double winner (“double sieger”) of BVB Borussia Dortmund. The German football (soccer) team won this season the Bundesliga (Germany first division championship) and the German Cup.