Aena Leads The Management Of Airports With 300 Million Passengers
Aena is reinforced. Starting next year, the Spanish public company will manage eleven new airports in Brazil , including Congonhas , in Sao Paulo. With the sum of the passengers of these infrastructures, according to data from 2019 -the last year before Covid-19-, Aena would exceed 300 million passengers per year, which places it in first place among the managers of this type of location in the Western world.
Behind is Vinci , the company that manages a large part of the airports in France and up to 52 worldwide -in locations such as Portugal, Cambodia or the Dominican Republic-. Thus, in 2019, Vinci moved 255 million passengers at its airport facilities.
Far away are Ferrovial Airports , which after obtaining a part of the JFK concession in New York has put up for sale its 25% in Heathrow , one of the most important infrastructures in the Old Continent. Having both airports and others such as Glasgow and Aberdeen (33 in total), the company calculates -according to 2019 figures- that it moves more than 122 million passengers annually.
Subsequently, Fraport , which among others manages the Frankfurt airport or thirteen infrastructures in Greece and AviAlliance , is in charge of some keys such as Athens or Budapest.
Aena’s new assets
The group of 11 Brazilian airports with which Aena has acquired registered a total of 26.8 million passengers in 2019, 12% of the country’s air traffic in that year. The busiest is Congonhas-São Paulo, with 22.8 million. Far from that figure is the second, Campo Grande (1.5 million) and Aviador César Bombonato, in Uberlândia (1.15 million). It also includes other smaller airports such as Santarém, Marabá or Montes Claros.
The award price, that is, the result of the public auction, was 2,450 million Brazilian reals, approximately 468 million euros. With the sum of the commitments indicated in the concession specifications, the total amount of the operation amounts to approximately 4,089 million Brazilian reals, about 780 million euros.
According to the planning of the public manager and studies carried out on the necessary investments, it is expected that they will be close to 5,000 million reais at constant prices in 2020, Aena itself pointed out . 73% of them will be carried out during the first phase of the concession, until 2028, although the contract will be effective for 30 years, with the possibility of five more, which shows that Brazil is a long-term bet for Aena.
The award of the group of 11 airports is the largest international development operation in the history of Aena, which, under the Aena Brasil brand, has 100% managed six other airports in the Northeast of the country since 2020 and has a presence in the United Kingdom, where it manages to 51% the London-Luton airport, and in Mexico, Colombia and Jamaica.
“Brazil’s potential is indisputable,” said the CEO of Aena, Maurici Lucena , upon learning of the award of the contracts to the Spanish public company. “Despite the hard times we have gone through due to Covid-19, we are convinced that internationalizing Aena is a guarantee for the future,” he said.
