The Swedish government meets the press about SAS – news Norway – Overview of news from different parts of the country

– We will most likely not be a long-term owner of SAS. This is what the Swedish Minister of Trade and Industry Karl-Petter Thorwaldsson said during a press conference on the airline’s restructuring plan, SAS Forward, on Tuesday. The press conference is about a restructuring of the company where they will convert several billion in debt into shares and raise fresh capital. The Swedish state owns just over 20 per cent of SAS, as does Denmark. The rest is owned by private investors. Norway sold out in 2018 for almost NOK 600 million. Struggling financially SAS has struggled financially after the outbreak of the corona pandemic, and at the end of the second quarter they noted a deficit of 1.6 billion Swedish kroner. Also in the first quarter, the company recorded a loss of billions. New details about SAS Forward were presented at the same time as the quarterly figures. The goal of the restructuring program is to reduce the company’s annual costs by SEK 7.5 billion. When the details of the crisis plan became known, SAS’s Norwegian CEO, Kjetil Håbjørg, was cautiously optimistic. – Part of the plan now is to convert debt into equity by raising equity in the market. The most important thing is to cut costs by 7.5 billion, and that is how we see it as a prerequisite for us to be able to raise that capital and get a healthy company, Håbjørg explained. Many cancellations The airline’s financial problems have also had consequences for SAS ‘passengers. Earlier this spring, the company announced that they had to cut about 4,000 of this summer’s flights. This corresponds to almost 5 percent of all SAS’s scheduled flights this summer. During the pandemic, around 5,000 people were laid off in SAS, about 40 percent of the staff. These were employees in several functions, both on the ground and in the air. In addition, the airport chaos that has ravaged Europe has affected SAS, and they have experienced several late cancellations of flights.



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