The Alitalia loan is extended, on the back of the State for another 4 years

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The attempt is a gamble in itself. After years of losses and debts, profligate managers, predatory partners, ten billion of public money burned in ten years for bailouts, who can guarantee that the new Alitalia in the hands of the state can actually be new, that is competitive, capable of generating business and not to turn into a black hole once again? It is not just a matter of precedents. The discontinuity – a term that the Government uses in these hours to ensure that this time it will go differently – indeed passes through a new industrial plan, then new routes and a new positioning on the market, but if this market is still stunned by Covid, the latest arrivals they will struggle more. Also for this reason, the control in public hands, which the executive is oriented to fix in four years, is configured as an obligatory choice. But not for this a guarantee for a resurrection.

The details of the industrial plan for the new Alitalia are not yet known. There is still time because in the next few days the inter-ministerial decree will be launched that starts the newco, a new company with an initial endowment of 20 million and without the ballast of the debts of the past. From that moment on, the new management, appointed by the government, will have one month to present the strategy. Some information has been anticipated by the Minister of Transport Paola De Micheli in an interview with Huffpost, speaking of “a repositioning on the medium and long range, sectors traditionally penalized to the detriment of tourism and entrepreneurship”. But these guidelines will have to be translated by the managers of the newco into routes, numbers, collection forecasts, risks of losses. Nothing more and nothing less than a business plan. And this plan will have to take into account how Covid has shuffled the cards. Will the bigger fish, like Lufthansa, get even bigger? Will a freshman like the new Alitalia be able to carve out a slice of the market that will lead it to become large or in any case self-sufficient? These are questions that increase the gamble because they have no answer. What the market is saying today is that there has been a slight recovery after the lockdown, the summer has pushed a few more trips, but the virus bill has been so strong that the imbalance is evident. And above all, the trend of infections, so different in numbers and intensity in the world, does not give guarantees on a market recovery. More. When there will be, what will this market be like?

Here then is that the bet of the new Alitalia passes from the ability to make the new industrial plan coincide as much as possible with the forecasts that can be made on a market still infected by Covid. Does everything that was thought of before the outbreak of the pandemic in terms of routes and business still make sense? Another question that still needs to be answered, in the awareness that it cannot be definitive. It is now evident that all players must take these considerations into account. Except that the new Alitalia will serve an additional difficulty. It has no industrial partner by its side. And this is an element that the market takes highly into consideration. Synergies and alliances are a protocol that has established itself on the pre Covid market. And it will tend to increase, as is happening in many other markets. The gamble mentioned at the beginning resides here: net of the previous nefarious and not, of a history made up of glorious seasons and other very black ones, will the new Alitalia in the hands of the State be able to do business? It is a question that is constantly circulating in the government rooms in these hours. Because there is money (up to 3 billion), there is the new president and the new CEO (the board of directors will be completed in the decree on the newco), the new plan will also arrive, but there is no industrial partner for rely on the market. In a single sentence: for a “not unlimited” period, as De Micheli underlined, but still substantial, Alitalia will have to support itself with money and public strategy.

And then the only way to make someone look at the door in four years and show interest, allowing the state to leave society, is to make it attractive. This means giving Alitalia a new corporate form, fewer aircraft (the hypothesis is to go from 110 to 70) and a strategy of discontinuity, but also paying a price. Double. The first is unpredictable and that is linked to any losses that could be recorded if the strategy does not work or if Covid keeps the market lame. The second is more immediate and unavoidable. Not all 11,000 current workers can fit into the new Alitalia. The idea is to make room for 6,000-6,500 of them. The others will remain in the bad company, the old Alitalia with the debts and management in the hands of the commissioner. The government is ready to support these workers with layoffs and by favoring the slides to retire, but this too is a cost. The idea is to gradually reabsorb the workers who will remain when the market allows it. But the most recent Italian industrial history is full of cases in which workers outside the perimeter were then expelled when the protection of the state failed. Mittal, for example, does not want to reabsorb the employees of the former Ilva of Taranto who were in the custody of the government commissioners. And so we go from stand-by mode to redundancies. On the other hand, Lufthansa has said it several times that Alitalia would be an opportunity only after having cleared it of thousands of jobs. The state umbrella cannot last forever. And it only risks keeping problems in the freezer which will then explode when and if someone wants to get their hands on the new Alitalia.

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