Passenger traffic is slowly picking up again at Frankfurt Airport. But that alone would not be enough to make the operator Fraport profitable again.
State aid from Germany and Greece has brought the Frankfurt airport operator Fraport back into the profit zone.
With passenger numbers rising again at the same time, the MDax Group at the Frankfurt location was able to reduce its operating expenses by 18 percent in the first half of the year compared to the same period in the previous year. For the year as a whole, CEO Stefan Schulte is now confident of a group result around the zero line.
In the second quarter, under the impact of the Corona crisis, sales amounted to 426 million euros (Q2 2020: 250 million), as the company reported on Tuesday. The bottom line for the shareholders was a profit of 85 million euros after a loss of 182 million a year earlier.
Public aid for Frankfurt and the 14 Fraport regional airports in Greece made a decisive contribution to this. Frankfurt Airport received almost 160 million euros from the Federal Republic of Germany and the State of Hesse to offset reserve costs from the first lockdown in 2020. Greece decided on an aid package of up to 178 million euros to waive concession payments for a longer period of time, which led to a positive effect of almost 70 million euros for Fraport in the second quarter.
According to Schultes, the prospects for the passenger business at Germany’s largest airport have not improved: he continues to expect less than 20 million to a maximum of 25 million passengers for the current year. The number of passengers on good days is currently around half of the level from the record year 2019, when a total of more than 70.5 million people used the airport. In the entire first half of 2021, on the other hand, there were just 6.5 million passengers, not 20 percent of the pre-crisis figure.
In the logistics crisis, on the other hand, there is still strong demand for air freight capacities. Germany’s largest cargo hub recorded 1.2 million tons in the first half of the year, an increase of 27.3 percent compared to the same period of the previous year and was thus 9.0 percent above the value from 2019.
Jane Stock is a technology author, who has written for 24 Hours World. She writes about the latest in technology news and trends, and is always on the lookout for new and innovative ways to improve his audience’s experience.
