Japan's ANA charts course through COVID with loans, domestic flights and accounting rules

Japan’s biggest airline, ANA, has turned to billions of dollars in loans and a government tourism campaign to weather the slump in air travel and could take advantage of accounting rules to avoid aircraft writedowns. Like other carriers, ANA has been burning through cash to maintain jets that are either grounded or flying with too few passengers during the coronavirus pandemic, pushing it to an operating loss of 159b yen ($1.51b) for the April-June quarter. Sources said Wednesday that ANA Holdings has secured $3.8b in subordinated loans from state-backed and private lenders. That means it will have raised $13.29b of debt to cope with the coronavirus fallout, says Yasuhito Tsuchiya, a senior analyst at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities. “It looks like they will have enough to survive,” said Tsuchiya, who forecasts the carrier is on course for a record operating loss of around 400b yen for the full year ending March 31. The airline is slashing personnel costs through redundancies and pay cuts. It is also getting government help including a waiver on airport landing fees. ANA has said it doesn’t expect its international air travel to fully recover until 2024. Story has more details.<br/>