According to ASPA, Aeromar has a total debt of around 6,500 million pesosbetween labor commitments and with suppliers, among which are State bodies such as the Mexico City International Airport (AICM) and Airports and Auxiliary Services (ASA), the largest supplier of jet fuel in the country, to which it owes 70.5 million pesos, according to its financial statements for the first quarter of the year.
What is the plan to save Aeromar?
To date, little is known about the plan to rescue the regional airline. Since 2016 there was talk of an injection of the Colombian company Avianca by 100 million dollarswhich did not materialize for various reasons, among them that both airlines seemed to be going in different directions.
“It never seemed like a good idea to me to do something with Aeromar, and we are not going to make any type of investment at all,” Anko van der Werff, then CEO of Avianca, said in 2019. “We are not its owners and we never will be, but it works great, there are commercial or strategic relationships that work and I don’t need to be the owner.”
Despite the fact that the plan to capitalize the airline fell through, for the directors the amount of investment was maintained. Danilo Correa, general director of Aeromar, assured last year that an investment of 50 to 100 million dollars was being negotiated with two business groups, with which they would seek triple the air fleet within five years.
“It is a process that in some way had not been decided so firmly in the company, but from the middle of the year until now, all the solvency was given to the investment bank, which is accompanying the process, to search for investors,” the manager told the media in October 2021. “A lot has changed because we already saw that there is a huge opportunity for growth, and that we cannot be left behind in investment.”
However, it seems that the investor could finally be the development bank, with which a credit of 75 million dollarsand that could radically change the shareholding structure of the airline.
In this regard, Humberto Gual, general secretary of ASPA of Mexico, affirms that the conversion of labor liabilities into shareholding has been put on the negotiating tables, with which the pilots could be shareholders of the airlinesomething that could also be considered with financing from development banks, a process similar to the one that is already underway with Altan Redes.
“We have a plan that has already been presented. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador himself, in a conversation I had with him, told me that both Mexican workers and pilots counted on him, he told us that he supported the government so that this airline could stay afloat,” says the representative. trade union Expansion.
Equity participation as a guarantee of financing seems feasible, especially in the face of a potential lack of assets.
“It is feasible, but normally Banobras or the development bank does not intervene as an integral part of the shareholding composition, but rather has guarantees with which they remain,” explains Fernando Gómez Suárez, a specialist in the airline sector. “The guarantees can be the aircraft themselves, but if they are not theirs, but leased, they would not have the assets to cover those guarantees. So what remains is the shareholding composition, where the government also assumes a risk”.
Despite this, government support already seems to be flowing, at least indirectly. Although since 2019 the General Directorate of Civil Aviation (today the Federal Civil Aviation Agency, AFAC) reported an audit of Aeromar, little was known about it, but something seems likely: given the debts that Aeromar has with ASA or with the AICM -where did you remember take out airlines that had liabilitiesas agreed by the federal government and the airline industry, the company should no longer be flying.
“What would correspond to the State as rector of aviation? Do not allow this to continue, and they would have had to stop the airline. Thanks to the intervention of ASPA de México with the various national political actors, the airline continues its operation, we have found sensitivity on the part of the current administration so that the airline continues operating”.