Friday 5th November 2021
Corona year tears bigger hole
BER expects a loss of 350 million euros
The capital’s airport is still heavily in debt due to numerous construction breakdowns before it opened. The pandemic is pulling BER even further into the lousy numbers. The operator FBB is assuming a group loss in the nine-digit range for the current year – less than expected.
The capital airport BER has been dependent on money from its state owners for even longer and is also in the red this year due to the Corona crisis. The operator FBB expects a turnover of around 267 million euros and an operating minus (Ebitda) of 48 million euros, according to an FBB report to Federal Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer, which was available to the Reuters news agency. The group loss is expected to amount to around 350 million euros and should therefore be around 50 million euros less than planned for 2021.
Due to a noticeable recovery in air traffic, operational profit was made from July to October. Liquidity is currently only secured until the first quarter of 2022, it said. The new BER boss Aletta von Massenbach had publicly admitted this several times.
The financial position of the airport has been difficult for years, because the operating company FBB is in debt with around 4.5 billion euros due to the delays in construction. The owners are to help BER through the crisis by 2026 with help of around 2.4 billion euros. They already announced this in March in a so-called letter of comfort. Berlin and Brandenburg each have a 37 percent stake in FBB, with the federal government holding 26 percent.
Business plan for partial debt relief
The business plan envisages that the shareholders will provide almost 1.9 billion euros in five annual steps from 2022. Of this, the owners are to raise 1.1 billion euros to partially discharge FBB and around 800 million euros as liquidity aid. In addition, the corona aid of over 495 million euros is to be converted into grants.
At BER, which opened in October 2020 after years of construction delays, a lot is not yet running smoothly – also due to restrictions due to corona protective measures. At the beginning of October there were long queues for check-in or baggage claim during the autumn break. Massenbach has already praised improvement, but also sees the airlines as having an obligation here. The report stated that the disruptions and delays were primarily due to “insufficiently deployed staff at the various process partners”. Overall, operations at BER are stable, but not yet optimal. “Our goal is to minimize waiting times as much as possible.” We are working on it at full speed.