Air France-KLM chief executive Ben Smith stresses any merger and acquisition moves must not weigh the group down as it seeks to boost its profitability by €2 billion ($2.2 billion) over the next five years.
The SkyTeam carrier was part of a consortium which in 2022 initially held exclusive talks with the then Italian government over a potential stake in ITA Airways, before Lufthansa later agreed a deal to become a shareholder in the airline. Air France-KLM more recently agreed a deal to take a 19% stake in Scandinavian Star Alliance carrier SAS and has flagged potential interest in the planned privatisation of TAP Air Portugal.
”Any investments we are looking at have to be within our risk profile,” said Smith during an investor call on 14 November. “It has to be clear to us that it is not going to weigh us down.
”We have a lot to do with Transavia, which is a major project, to have to look at transforming another airline,” he says. “That’s not something we take lightly. That’s why the 19% stake in SAS we are comfortable with.
”It’s not done yet, but we assume we are going to get there. And we view this as a very low-cost, low-risk way of participating in M&A. It’s in our risk profile, we are quite comfortable with it, and what we like is immediately SAS will exit Star Alliance, which we think is very big win for SkyTeam. And in the near future we will look at does it make sense to bring SAS into the Air France-KLM, Virgin, Delta joint venture.”
He adds, “we’ll see” when it comes to other M&A opportunities in Europe. ”They have to be clearly aligned to the commitments we have made,” he says.
Smith had earlier provided some colour on why the airline had not moved ahead on ITA Airways, an airline whose predecessor, Alitalia, Air France-KLM has twice previously invested in
“To put a third opportunity in front of our board, we would have to be quite solid and comfortable we could make it. We didn’t feel that was the case.”
Smith points to the complexity of the Italian carrier operating out of two airports in Milan and the Italian government’s desire to develop Rome Fiumicino as a hub given the level of seasonal traffic at the latter.
“So we stepped back and are quite comfortable that with our position at Linate, Malpensa and Rome we’ll get the feed that we want.” he says. ”It’s not causing us any grief that we did not move forward on that.”
