The dominant topic in German aviation continues to be the insolvency of Air Berlin, which has also shown how intense the competition really is for Germany’s airlines. Here, 160 airlines are vying for customers on domestic routes, flights to European destinations and around the world. In hardly any other country is competition so fierce. The low-cost sector is securing considerable shares of the market, which is leading to a decline in revenue per-ticket overall. At the same time, the state-owned airlines in Asia and in particular the Gulf States – and increasingly in Turkey – are continuing their predatory competition. The consequences have been felt not only by Air Berlin. In May, the long-established Italian airline Alitalia was forced to declare bankruptcy. In early October, British Monarch Airlines was hit – tens of thousands of passengers were left stranded across Europe. Other airlines are being forced to make painful cuts. Accordingly, the Spanish airline Iberia is letting around 1,000 employees go. 

Competition intensity will continue to increase in Europe as well as in Germany for the foreseeable future. As such, I consider Lufthansa to be well-equipped. Firstly, we are making use of the opportunities of digitalization like no other airline worldwide and are creating innovative offers. Secondly, we are receiving one factory-new, fuel-saving aircraft almost every week in the ongoing year. This helps us save our fuel consumption and our costs, and at the same time we are making an important contribution to climate protection. And thirdly, we have the best staff any airline worldwide could dream of. The almost 130,000 employees – of which almost 70,000 work in Germany – are crucial to the success of the Lufthansa Group. We want to continue to offer them secure jobs and fair working conditions in the future. On our future growth trajectory, we are able to offer an additional 6,000 people career prospects in 2018 alone and, in that interest, we are investing more than EUR 3 billion.

The Lufthansa Group is and will remain committed to the values of a social market economy. This is not self-evident everywhere in the international aviation industry. After the previous parliamentary term ended with a bang from the perspective of aviation policy, we hope that the evident political energy will be sustained in order to end unilateral taxation decisions or to dismantle structural burdens of domestic air traffic, because aviation links people and cultures and thus contributes to an understanding between nations, prosperity and liberty. With this in mind, I look forward to working with the members of the German Bundestag and wish them much success in the tasks ahead.

Carsten Spohr

Chairman of the Executive Board and
CEO of Deutsche Lufthansa AG