Who owns the airlines
In one of my recent posts I argued that there were too many airlines and that consolidation will be necessary.
In a previous one still I opinionated that airlines should diversify their investments and should look more towards mobility and transport rather than just sticking solely to air travel.
These thoughts got me wondering who in fact owns who in the world of airlines. The task is huge as there are thousands of airlines, big and small, worldwide and the ownership lines are complex. I had to start from somewhere, so I started from wikipedia’s list of the top 10 airlines by scheduled international passengers carried. [Which are: Ryanair, Lufthansa, Easy Jet, Air France, British Airways, KLM, Emirates, American Airlines, Singapore Airlines and Cathay]
Airlines who owns who?I tried to find out who their major shareholders were [more than 3% of shares]. I also looked at what they owned.
The findings are displayed in the diagram above which once clicked on opens to full scale.
For convenience I have put KLM and AirFrance together.
Some of the findings are:
There is a difference in shareholder nature between Europe and US and Asian/ Middle east companies.
In US/Europe the shareholders tend to be investment management organisations or mutual fund firms, whilst Asian / middle east tend to be more state owned with Bank participation.
Another trend is that European and American Airlines are more intertwined together, in terms of ownership with all European and American carriers in the top 10 having a common shareholder with at least another carrier.
[one could also go into the meanings and effects of having an investment company such as the capital group holding 2 digit figure shares in Ryanair, Air France and American Airlines and what this means to the airlines, to the market and to competition, but I am not an economist and I do not have the tools to go there...]
Nothing similar in terms of links between investors is observed for Asia and middle east..
In terms of subsidiaries of these major airlines, to my disappointment most of them owned other airlines or service companies related to the aviation industry. This is not a bad thing in itself as it is only natural for market consolidation. The disappointing part is that airline’s investments are not diverse enough. Only british airways have an investment in another transport sector: the rail [well done BA!] American airlines have investments in Real estate. I would say that we should observe an evolution towards further diversification in the future [I read Air France will buy shares in fast train operations]
Well here it is. By all means it is not an exhaustive piece of research. I also put a disclaimer that whereas I got the sources from the internet from either the companies themselves or from investment and borckering websites or from third websites such as wikipedia, and that I did this at the best of my understanding, there may be mistakes.
As for the legend: In green boxes you find the 10 airlines. In Red you find their owners, in yellow their subsidiaries. In blue there are the cases where two companies cross-own shares [e.g. Iberia and British Airways]. The percentage figure is how much is owned. There is a boundary for each of the top ten airlines. When a company owns shares in more than one airline, it is present in a number of zones, the percentages per airline are listed.
Enjoy, and I would really appreciate to read what you think, and whether we could take this study further ahead…
