- The pandemic’s impact on the wider global aviation industry will be more than 10 times that of airline losses of US$200 billion, founder and president of Institute for Aviation Research says
- Airports in Asia-Pacific will see a loss of US$23.9 billion this year as 1.5 billion fewer passengers travel through region’s hubs, Airports Council International says
The losses for the wider global aviation industry, excluding airlines, from the coronavirus pandemic could exceed US$2 trillion this year, with millions of jobs at risk in Asia-Pacific alone, according to Zheng Lei, founder and president of the Institute for Aviation Research, an independent think tank.
“Airlines are the key to the whole supply chain, if they become problematic, other parts of the supply chain will be affected,” said Lei, who is also the head of aviation department at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia.“As to impact on the global aviation sector, it has already surpassed US$200 billion. This is only for airlines, not including [the] impact on airports, retailers inside airports and on-the-ground workers. Its bigger impact should be more than tenfold of that on other sectors in the economy, such as to tourism, and shocks to export and import trade.”
According to recent estimates by the International Air Transport Association (IATA), passenger revenue losses for airlines in the Asia-Pacific this year are expected to reach around US$88 billion and US$252 billion globally....
....MUCH MORE
Recently, that time Buffett lost his mind:
"Warren Buffett: ‘I won’t be selling airline stocks’"
Warren, noooo....
Here's what Mr. Buffet told Fortune magazine: in 1999
...Move on to failures of airlines. Here’s a list of 129 airlines that in the past 20 years filed for bankruptcy. Continental was smart enough to make that list twice. As of 1992, in fact--though the picture would have improved since then--the money that had been made since the dawn of aviation by all of this country’s airline companies was zero.Mr. Buffett repeated the sentiment on the 2003 centenary of Orville's first flight.
Absolutely zero.
I like to think that if I’d been at Kitty Hawk in 1903 when Orville Wright took off, I would have been farsighted enough, and public-spirited enough--I owed this to future capitalists--to shoot him down. I mean, Karl Marx couldn’t have done as much damage to capitalists as Orville did.
Then in the 2007 Chairman's letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway he wrote (pp 8):
...Now let’s move to the gruesome. The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. Think airlines. Here a durable competitive advantage has proven elusive ever since the days of the Wright Brothers. Indeed, if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk , he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down. The airline industry’s demand for capital ever since that first flight has been insatiable. Investors have poured money into a bottomless pit, attracted by growth when they should have been repelled by it.And now he defends holding them?
And I, to my shame, participated in this foolishness when I had Berkshire buy U.S. Air preferred stock in 1989. As the ink was drying on our check, the company went into a tailspin, and before long our preferred dividend was no longer being paid. But we then got very lucky. In one of the recurrent, but always misguided, bursts of optimism for airlines, we were actually able to sell our shares in 1998 for a hefty gain. In the decade following our sale, the company went bankrupt. Twice.
To sum up, think of three types of “savings accounts.” The great one pays an extraordinarily high interest rate that will rise as the years pass. The good one pays an attractive rate of interest that will be earned also on deposits that are added. Finally, the gruesome account both pays an inadequate interest rate and requires you to keep adding money at those disappointing returns....
Here's Yahoo Finance with a pretty good interview despite the conclusion being wildly at variance with our thinking:
Here's the only pure-play airline ETF:Warren Buffett likes airline stocks despite the recent dramatic sell off so don’t expect Buffett to dump his shares....
