Global air transport will lose $157.2 billion in 2020 and 2021.
Global air transport will have this year a net loss of $ 118,500 million (99,500 million euros), and although its situation will improve in 2021 is still estimated to close next year in the red, with losses of $ 38,700 million (32,000 million euros), today the International Air Transport Association (IATA), EFE reported.
See also: Airlines need another $80 bln in aid to survive -IATA.
The negative outlook for one of the sectors hardest hit by the covid pandemic, announced at the annual general meeting of IATA, worsens the forecasts issued in June, when the association predicted net losses of $84.3 billion (70,000 million euros) for 2020 and $15.8 billion (13,000 million euros) in 2021.
“The crisis has been devastating and unforgiving. In it, the airlines have cut their costs by 45.8%, but revenues have fallen by 60.9%, and as a result companies will lose $66 (55 euros) for each passenger transported this year,” said the director general of IATA, Alexandre de Juniac, who will leave office in 2021.
At the end of 2019, IATA had predicted that the sector would grow by 3.4% in 2020, compared to 3.1% that year, but did not count on the arrival of a pandemic that left a large part of the global fleet of airlines on the ground for months (demand fell by 71% in the second quarter) and threatens to reduce the workforce of these companies by more than 40% due to the crisis.
IATA, which brings together some 300 global airlines, predicts that next year will still be a “difficult first half” after which improvements will begin to be seen, accompanied by an increase in demand with the reopening of borders and the availability of anti-covid vaccines.
This allows the airline association to foresee that in the last quarter of 2021 there will be benefits again, although to reach that situation, De Juniac stressed that “borders need to be reopened safely and without quarantines so that people can fly again”.
In 2020, IATA estimates that airlines have seen their revenues reduced by 61%, from $838 billion in 2019 (706 billion euros) to $328 billion (276 billion euros) this year.
To face the crisis, the sector cut its costs by 55%, from 795,000 million dollars (670,000 million euros) last year to 430,000 million dollars (362,000 million euros) this year.
“The history books will remember 2020 as the worst year financially for the sector,” said De Juniac, who admitted that if the airlines had not received government aid totaling $173 billion ($145 billion) “there would have been large-scale bankruptcies.
IATA estimates that in 2020 passenger traffic will have fallen by 60.5% year-on-year, from 4.5 billion in 2019 to 1.8 billion in 2020, bringing the sector back to the figures of 17 years ago.
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