Originally Posted by
Akrapovic
Yet somehow they've managed it. Why would you run a company for 40 years that's barely made any profit? You wouldn't would you . . . That's because they do make money, lots of it, but it's conveniently 'spent' on areas of the business that are justified as legitimate costs to the tax man, yet somehow end up in individual's pockets.
Which is all well and good during "normal" times, then an event occurs and suddenly because they haven't shown a profit for many years banks and governments don't want to lend to them as they have no credit rating. This is exactly what happened during COVID and they had to go to private equity and sell assets (787's) to bridge the gap often at extortionate rates. Most other airlines were able to tap the various schemes available from government's however because Virgin decides to run the business the way they do these funds were unavailable to them. It nearly sent the company under as SRB didn't have a lot of spare cash sitting idle and the biggest other shareholder was unable to just give money to the company due to limitations imposed by the US government for their own bailout.
Sometimes being the smartest in the room doesn't always work out and in Virgin's case, every time there's a hiccup in the world economy the company is literally right on the edge fighting for survival a la GFC, Gulf War 1 and 2 where many crew were made redundant.