DFreight forwarder Klaus-Michael Kuehne (Kuehne & Nagel) further increased its stake in Lufthansa, giving the airline’s share price a little boost. The listing started 3.3 percent higher, but then quickly gave way and is currently only half as strong.
According to a mandatory announcement on Wednesday evening, the billionaire’s Kühne Aviation GmbH bought a further 5 percent and is now the largest shareholder in the group with 15.01 percent, ahead of the federal government’s economic stabilization fund with around 14 percent. However, once the direct aid from the Corona crisis has been repaid, the latter must return its shares by October 2023.
According to a mandatory announcement by Lufthansa in May, when the 10 percent threshold was exceeded, Kühne had already declared that she was pursuing strategic goals with the investment and was not ruling out further acquisitions in the next twelve months. The major shareholder would accept a seat on the supervisory board and nominate a suitable person, it said.
Kuehne is the majority shareholder of the logistics group Kuehne + Nagel and a major shareholder in the Hamburg container shipping company Hapag-Lloyd. According to industry observers, the entrepreneur could be targeting Lufthansa’s lucrative freight business in particular. Some large shipping companies, which earned a lot of money in the corona pandemic thanks to high freight rates, recently invested in the air freight sector.
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The fact that investors believe that Kühne’s transaction could also help himself is evident on Thursday. The Kuehne + Nagel share price recorded a premium of 1.7 percent in Switzerland, and even 3.4 percent on the most liquid German trading venue, Tradegate. Due to the loss of capital market equivalence, the connection between the Swiss stock market and the EMU markets is currently disrupted.
