2023-11-15 03:03:55
The acquisition process of Air Europa by IAG, Iberia’s parent holding company, is very close to entering a new and decisive phase. The airline conglomerate has almost ready the file on the operation to send it to the Competition authorities of the European Commission, as announced on Monday by the company’s president, Luis Gallego.
During his time in New York, where he received the “businessman of the year” award from the Spanish Chamber of Commerce in the United States, Gallego assured that they trust that during the month of November IAG will present the final file that will allow it to move forward. with the purchase. IAG and the European Commission are currently exchanging information on the operation in what constitutes the phase prior to the formal presentation of the acquisition proposal to the EU Competition authorities. Once it is sent, time will begin to run and Brussels will have 35 days to approve the operation as planned or request additional measures. You can also choose to move to the so-called phase two, in which you would analyze the acquisition in more detail.
Brussels and the holding company are analyzing which routes the integration of Air Europa into IAG could affect with the aim of defining the “remedies” or concessions that the conglomerate would have to make in the form of the transfer of “slots” – takeoff time slots. and landing – for the operation to be viable. Brussels already expressed in June 2021 that it was concerned that, as the operation was then conceived, the concentration of both airlines would reduce the offer of flights in seventy pairs of cities of origin and destination within Spain and to or from this country. That plan, in any case, declined months later after IAG and Air Europa agreed to give themselves a deadline to think about a new one in the face of community reluctance that was agreed in February of last year and which is the one that is now under discussion.
The granting of landing and takeoff slots, in any case, has recently been questioned as the main concession for this type of operations. In a recent interview in the Financial Times newspaper, Didier Reynders, acting Commissioner for Competition, stated that “a few years ago, we were sure that the slots solution was a good one. Maybe [ahora] the results are not there,” he explained.
Hub Defense
Both Gallego and the president of Iberia, Fernando Candela, once again made a passionate defense of an operation that, in their opinion, is “very good for Spain and for the Madrid hub, in order to be able to compete with the big ones.” “hubs” in northern Europe – said Gallego – that allow us to have that more global ‘hub’ that looks not only at the Atlantic, but also towards Asia.”
Gallego stressed that Asia, which is emerging from a long phase of route closures due to Covid, presents enormous opportunities, but IAG is currently committed to strengthening alliances with other partners (and cited Qatar Airways) “that allow us to fly to Asia at through Doha without deploying our own capabilities.
Candela elaborated in the same sense that this Doha route allows Iberia to open the door to more than 200 destinations in Asia “and is a preliminary step to understanding that market with many opportunities” but he insisted, like Gallego, that the priority is in “consolidating the operation with Air Europa in order to have a critical mass” that allows Madrid to compare itself with the “hub” that KLM has developed in Amsterdam, according to Efe.
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