Lufthansa to add JV partner this year

Speaking at the Freighters and Belly Cargo Conference in Abu Dhabi, sponsored by Air Cargo News, Bernhard Kindelbacher, senior vice president for strategy, subsidiaries and business development at Lufthansa, said the carrier will announce a new joint venture partner before the end of this year.

The planned JV, Kindelbacher said, will be an expansion of the successful one Lufthansa created with All Nippon Airways (ANA), which involves two carriers with complementary cargo networks with only minimal overlap. He also Lufthansa would share an IT system that would mesh well with the partner carrier, allowing customers to see both partners’ flights on the same platform.

“We are talking with other partners,” Kindelbacher said. “There will be very few partners that we would like to talk about because it is a major effort. We have discussions and we hope that by the end of this year we can announce another partnership.”

Both JV participants, he added, would also have to have antitrust immunity, aligned sales forces and “metal-neutral” booking capability.