Alitalia Shares Suspended (Wed 5th May)

[Thunderbug]

BBC News (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3686165.stm)

Shares and bonds of Alitalia have been suspended, the Italian stock exchange has announced.

The Italian carrier's ordinary shares, as well as a convertible bond issued by the airline, will remain suspended until the outcome of an Alitalia board meeting scheduled for tomorrow (Thursday), a spokeswoman for the exchange said.

Alitalia shares slipped 12.5% this week in heavy trading after reports that a senior manager had warned the company could seek to be declared insolvent as early as this week if unions do not agree to a restructuring plan.

The Italian government, which owns a majority stake in the airline, has not indicated whether it intends to intervene to aid the company or what form of state assistance might be given

[Kalium Chloride]

Efforts to restructure Alitalia, which is losing $1m (£557m) a day, have been met with tough resistance from staff.


Losing £557m a day? That's good going, even for Alitalia...

[Few Cloudy]

aint 557 million pounds - more like 557 thousand.

It is just around what until recently Swiss was losing and - er - how are things over at SAS?

[Toilet_Town]

BBC;


Alitalia, which is estimated to be losing some 50,000 euros an hour (£34,000; US$60,000), says it now has only 200m euros of cash liquidity left.

[abra]

I think it is all Air Atlanta's and BA's fault myself..I mean look at EAL!

[Flip Flop Flyer]

Labour concessions reached with all 60ish SAS unions, including the mastodont CC union. CC took a very heavy pay cut, so they're now on par with the industry average for majors in Europe.

In short, SAS has completed their 2 Billion Euro savings plan and has, as promised, launched a number of new routes. As part of the plan, SAS now has 3 mainline divisions (Denmark, Norway and Sweden), a low-cost arm (Snowflake) and a commuter division flying the turboprops (SAS Commuter). They've also abondoned the, very expensive, CC rule which saw CC's placed on flights according to their home country and the proportion of stake that country held in SAS. So you'd have 2 Danes, 2 Noggies and 3 Swedes in the cabin, and SAS would spend gazillions positioning them back and forth between CPH, OSL and ARN no to mention the per diems and hotel costs.

Basically, SAS management told staff to either accepts cuts, which would allow the airline to expand, or reject the proposals and witness downsizing on a monumental scale. It will, however, be interesting to see how long SAS will make good on their promises before they start outsourcing to Spanair, Blue1 etc.

Wasn't Air France, at one point, looking at acquireing a stake in Alitalia? Did that evaporate with their merger with KLM?

[Kalium Chloride]

Lemme see...

200m euros...burn it at 50,000 an hour...that's five and a half months' cash left.

[swedish]

Maybe 5 1/2 months, but if you don't have a plan to reverse the situation then why carry on only to put off the known outcome? Looks like a restructure / rationalisation is on the cards for survival.