The South African government on February 26 announced plans to provide a financial aid of 16.4 billion Rand (US $ 1.07 billion) to revive the (SAA) currently. heavy loss.
According to the Vietnam News Agency correspondent in Pretoria, in his annual speech on the budget allocation plan for the period of 2020-2021, South African Finance Minister Tito Mboweni informed that the government had arranged 16.4 billion Rand to help SAA fulfills its financial obligations, which include the payment of guaranteed loans, as well as the costs incurred during the loan process.
Minister Mboweni said that according to the plan, the bailout package will be disbursed within the next 3 years.
However, the allocation plan will be continuously adjusted and updated according to the actual operational situation of SAA to bring the highest efficiency.
Earlier, on February 6, the 100-year-old airline announced plans to stop operating most domestic flights and some international flights, while considering selling some assets and cutting reduce staff to minimize operating costs.
In November 2019, SAA employees went on strike to protest plans to cut wages and lay off 900 employees, forcing the airline to cancel all flights for several days. SAA said the union strikes representing about 3,000 of the 5,000 employees cost 50 million Rand (about US $ 3.36 million) a day.
In fact, SAA has started to from since 2008 due to weak management capacity, which resulted in the loss of a large number of passengers to the low-cost airlines.
In addition, rising operating costs, especially fuel prices, have contributed to pushing one of Africa’s most historic airlines into a spiral of losses.
From 2008 to now, SAA accumulated losses of up to 32 billion Rand, equivalent to about 2 billion USD.
