A Monday statement of Chief Executive Ben Smith reveals that, Air France-KLM plans to raise more capital to reduce debt and in-inforce its balance sheet as he sees an upward trend of air travel, later in the year .
Earlier, on 12th april , Air France-KLM announced the launch of a capital increase without shareholders’ preferential subscription rights by way of a public offering and with a priority subscription period on an irreducible and reducible basis granted to existing shareholders (the “Capital Increase”) for an amount of approximately €988 million, which may be increased to €1,136 million in the event of the exercise in full of the increase option (the “Increase Option”).
Smith was addressing an online industry event as a 1 billion euro ($1.2 billion) share issue by the airline group neared completion, and he indicated that , the move could arrive relatively quickly to raise more capital , as reported by Reuters .
“We do have heavy debt that is holding back our balance sheet, so this may have to get looked at again later in the year,” he said, adding that Air France-KLM currently plans to run at 50% capacity for the summer but still hopes to add more.
Air France-KLM and China Eastern Airlines to reinforce their partnership.
China Eastern Airlines, which holds 37,527,410 shares of the Company (i.e. 8.8% of the share capital and 10.5% of the voting rights) had committed on 2nd April 2021 to Increase a fraction of the share capital representing less than 10% of the total share capital of the Company. Apart from that, both airline groups have decided to extend the scope of their partnership through :
