Page 4 - bne IntelliNews monthly magazine October 2024

4 I Companies & Markets bne October 2024
Martin Gauss: "With the new modern fleet, we are at the forefront of the industry, a fact that I am very proud of." / airBaltic INTERVIEW
Martin Gauss, airBaltic CEO Linas Jegelevicius in Vilnius
Latvia’s airBaltic, the leading airline in the Baltic states, has been in the news recently, amid talk of an initial public offering (IPO), with Germany’s Lufthansa taking a stake as a lead investor beforehand. The state-owned airline has confirmed that it is in talks with one strategic investor. To find out what the airline is up to, bne IntelliNews sat down with Martin Gauss, airBaltic’s CEO.
Gauss shied away from discussing the IPO directly but was keen to talk about the turnaround story at airBaltic over the past decade. airBaltic currently operates over 130 routes from Riga, Tallinn, Vilnius, Tampere, and seasonally from Gran Canaria, connecting to various destinations across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and the Caucasus. It already has code-sharing and wet leasing agreements with Lufthansa.
“Indeed, there is a lot of discussion and talk about our potential IPO, but we are not commenting on it yet, regulation does not permit me to – the earliest time we potentially could do an IPO is the second half of 2024 or in 2025,” Gauss says, emphasising that “it is not happening overnight”,
Your IPO quest comes amid news that airBaltic saw a turnover of €339.3 million in the first half of this year,
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but you posted a significant loss of €88.8 million, a stark contrast to the same period last year when the company posted a profit of €14.6 million. Lufthansa, Air France, KLM also saw worse figures in the first half-year. What is this decrease due to? Can we speak of a slight overheating effect in the aviation market?
Generally, we are seeing the opposite – we reported many higher numbers than a year before. We are not seeing the overheating effect. I think that, in general, this year, for the first time, all Europe is coming [back] to the numbers of the pre-pandemic level in 2019.
In fact, airBaltic looks better than many others – we had a higher Ebitdar margin. Our airline is definitely in growth, using an aircraft model which does not exist in Europe: The airBaltic fleet consists of a single aircraft type – the Airbus A220-300 – and the airline currently operates 48 aircraft of this type. airBaltic plans to operate a fleet of 100 A220-300s by 2030.
Looking at the first half-year report, I’d also like to pay attention to that, for the first time, we had a breakout between two business segments that recovered. On one