Malaysia Airlines is struggling to make payments owed to creditors and lessors amid the coronavirus pandemic that has forced it to slash its operations. The national airline, which restructured after two deadly crashes in 2014, has a new plan involving big discounts from creditors, but unlike last time the cash-strapped government is unwilling to bail it out. The airline has been loss-making for about a decade. Losses were aggravated by two tragedies in 2014 - the mysterious disappearance of flight MH370 and the shooting down of flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine. In the price-sensitive domestic market, it faced rising competition from low-cost rivals. In the international market, cashed-up Gulf carriers Emirates, Etihad Airways and Qatar Airways used the heft of their global networks to encroach on lucrative long-haul routes. Budget rival AirAsia X, now itself in financial trouble, offered discounted fares on routes within Asia. State fund Khazanah Nasional became the sole shareholder of its parent company and delisted it in 2014 as part of a $1.5b restructuring that saw its staff numbers cut by 6,000, or about 30%. It targeted a return to profit in three years, but it has not been profitable yet. Explainer has more background.<br/>
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Finnair has enough cash to survive until late 2021 with little or no flying, having introduced a raft of financial measures to ensure it can survive the coronavirus crisis, according to the carrier’s CE Topi Manner. “Our financial contingency measures have been quite sizeable and we have been developing a financial bazooka of sorts for ourselves, and that is why our cash position at this present time is still good,” Manner said. Despite the operator running at an operating loss of around E2m ($2.4m) per day – half of which is depreciation – “even if we would be flying very little, or nothing at all, well into the next year then our cash would be adequate until the latter part of 2021”, Manner states. Finnair has raised almost E1b of new debt since the crisis began – including via a government-guaranteed loan and through the sale-and-leaseback of one of its Airbus A350s – while it also carried out a rights issue that raised E500m of equity. At the same time, the Helsinki-based carrier has been minimising costs in other ways, and currently has around 80% of its staff furloughed, alongside plans for a permanent 1,000-job reduction from its pre-pandemic headcount of around 6,700 employees. “The permanent reduction of 1,000 people is directed to our land operations and headquarters operations,” Manner says, explaining that the cuts would be “something like 30%” of the pre-pandemic workforce serving those functions.<br/>
Cash-strapped Qantas on Wednesday launched a range of pricey athleisure clothes as its latest revenue-raising scheme to help weather the coronavirus pandemic. The branded range includes A$150 T-shirts and A$425 cashmere sweaters designed by Australian Martin Grant, and comes after recent sold-out sales of bar carts from retired Boeing Co 747 planes and business class pajamas and amenity kits. Qantas has grounded the bulk of its fleet and raised equity and debt to boost liquidity during the pandemic, which has seen it announce plans to cut nearly 30% of its workforce. It is bracing for a A$10b hit to revenue this financial year because of border closures and lower travel demand.<br/>