Billionaire Klaus-Michael Kühne is Lufthansa’s largest shareholder
The Hamburg logistics entrepreneur and billionaire Klaus-Michael Kühne has risen to become the largest Lufthansa shareholder.
He is displacing the federal government as the previous largest shareholder in second place.
The federal government is no longer number one at Lufthansa. Klaus-Michael Kühne is now the largest shareholder in the MDAX group. The Hamburg-based logistics company has increased its stake to 15.01 percent, according to a voting rights announcement published yesterday evening. Kühne thus holds around one percent more than the Economic Stabilization Fund WSF, which last held 14.1 percent of Lufthansa shares.
At the beginning of March, the entrepreneur triggered the notification threshold of five percent via a private investment company. Only a few weeks later, in May, Kühne expressed interest in a Lufthansa supervisory board post. At that time, the entrepreneur had just increased his stake to over ten percent.
Kühne is pursuing strategic goals with Lufthansa
Lufthansa is “an excellent addition to the previous investment portfolio, in which logistical know-how is bundled via various independent investments,” it said in the mandatory notification at the time. Kuehne owns the majority in the Swiss logistics group Kuehne + Nagel and 30 percent in the Hamburg shipping company Hapag-Llyod. The entrepreneur ranks 33rd on the Forbes list of billionaires with an estimated fortune of $32 billion.
According to industry observers, the entrepreneur could be targeting Lufthansa’s lucrative freight business in particular. Some large shipping companies, which earned a lot of money in the corona pandemic thanks to high freight rates, recently invested in the air freight sector.
However, it was only a matter of time before the federal government was replaced as Lufthansa’s largest shareholder. In November last year, Lufthansa fully repaid the state aid granted during the corona pandemic. The state must therefore give up its shares again by October 2023.
In the Corona crisis and the associated business slump, Lufthansa negotiated a state rescue package worth a total of nine billion euros with the federal government and the EU Commission: three billion euros as a loan from the state development bank KfW and six billion euros from the WSF. According to its own statements, the group had used around 3.8 billion euros.
Meanwhile, investors are reacting positively to the increase in the Lufthansa stake by the entrepreneur Kühne: The Lufthansa share is up 1.7 percent in early Frankfurt trading. Papers from the aviation group have been under massive pressure since the outbreak of the corona pandemic. Since the beginning of the year alone, they have lost more than 20 percent of their value.
Internal dispute at Lufthansa
In the meantime, Lufthansa supervisory board chairman Karl-Ludwig Kley has conjured up cohesion in the face of internal conflicts at the airline caused by chaotic conditions in the summer travel boom. “Either we lose together or we win together,” explained Kley in an interview published on Lufthansa’s intranet. The supervisory board is convinced that the measures that have now been introduced, such as flight cancellations and additional staff, would be successful.
Kley did not mention the public fire letter from the Lufthansa staff representatives, which made three pages of serious accusations against the board of directors because of the austerity measures in the Corona crisis. In their letter to the Supervisory Board, the representatives of the staff in the cockpit, cabin and on the ground had called for an end to the austerity measures and what they believed to be the mismanagement.
