Lufthansa swings to largest ever quarterly loss

Lufthansa has reported its largest ever quarterly operating loss and said it can no longer rule out job cuts in its home country, despite having taken a E9b government bailout. The flag carrier, which has already said it would shed 22,000 staff and retire 100 aircraft, on Thursday announced a E1.7b operating loss for the three months to the end of June, as passenger traffic and its revenues collapsed. For the first six months of 2020, the total loss was E2.9b. Carsten Spohr, CE, warned that the group, like other airlines around the world, faced “enormous challenges” that meant it was “forced to make hard and painful cuts”. Lufthansa now expects it to take until 2024 for air travel demand to return to pre-coronavirus levels, echoing a more pessimistic outlook by Iata, the global air trade body, which last week warned it would take a year longer than previously predicted for passenger traffic to recover. Lufthansa has already reduced its workforce by 8,300 compared with a year ago. But on Thursday it warned that compulsory redundancies in Germany were now likely amid faltering talks with unions. Spohr said how deep the job cuts were in Germany would depend on negotiations with unions but he criticised the delay in reaching a conclusion. “It is far too slow for me . . . All our competitors in the world meanwhile have achieved agreements with their unions or without such have acted unilaterally with their unions. Even with the German government we were faster with this billion-euro rescue package than with our unions,” he said.<br/>