Originally Posted by
B772
I agree CX will survive this crisis. Unfortunately I believe Hong Kong Airlines (HX) will disappear or be restructured. For starters 10% of the workforce are to lose their jobs with the remainder of the workforce to work 2 weeks and 2 weeks off with half pay. HX has been bleeding cash for months with most salaries for Nov 19 paid in Dec 19. Services to San Francisco, Los Angeles and Vancouver were axed plus inflight entertainment on other routes abolished to reduce costs. A number of aircraft have been surrendered including an A350-900. A huge capital injection last month was made in order to retain their AOC
Now the bad and possibly sad news. HX are part of the HNA Group who own or have an interest in about 18 airlines including Virgin Australia (19.82%). With 410,000 employees HNA need to raise tens of billions of dollars at short notice to stay in business. On 06 Feb 20 HNA advised they wish to sell Swissport. Private equity most likely will purchase Swissport at a price of USD800,000,000 less than what HNA paid for it just under 2 years ago. Swissport employs 66,000 employees and owns Aerocare in Australia and New Zealand.
Virgin Australia will need cash very soon to stay solvent. It will be a challenge for Etihad, HNA and the Nanshan Group (Qingdao Airlines) to supply cash. SQ could come to the rescue with a fire sale offer for the airline minus Branson which would save a significant amount of money each year.
Stay tuned. There could be a domino effect of collapses.
Re: VA
There are actually plenty of other ways to raise money other than existing share holders.
Likewise if any of the shareholders want to get out of their ownership; they sell their shares. This has no impact on the operation of the airline - maybe puts downwards pressure on the share price (if there’s any further it can drop)