Aircraft delivery delays from Boeing are "extremely annoying" and cost Lufthansa lots of money, but the U.S. planemaker should be able to resolve its problems, the German airline's CEO said in a newspaper interview. Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr was direct when asked by Switzerland's Neue Zuercher Zeitung how badly recent setbacks at Boeing and subsequent delivery hold-ups were affecting his firm. "This is extremely annoying and costs us a great deal of money," Spohr said in the interview published at the weekend.
After a rocky few years, British Airways parent IAG is once again plotting its bid for global expansion.
Shareholders in Lufthansa aired their concerns to management at the annual general meeting on Tuesday, troubled by the impact of a wave of strikes on profit and service standards as well as a boardroom overhaul that unsettled investors. One top concern was the image of core brand Lufthansa Airlines as a premium provider, following flight cancellations forced by the industrial action as well as operational problems. The board, led by CEO Carsten Spohr, must do more to prevent "service chaos" in future, warned Hendrik Schmidt, a corporate governance specialist at Deutsche Bank subsidiary DWS, Lufthansa's third-largest shareholder with just under 1.5%.