Ruzyne departure board

Airport For Sale

Prague's Ruzyne airport management continues to get it ready for privatization. Recently Miroslav Dvorak, airport’s chairman of the board and Letiste Praha’s CEO, reported that the actual price of Letiste Praha, the company operating Ruzyne International, reaches now about CZK 75 billion. According to his words its market price is “around 15 times the EBITDA (Earnings before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization)”, which (i. e. EBITDA) is about CZK 3 billion now.

The process of getting ready the airport for sale has been running for several months already. Thus, in December each tenth job in Ruzyne was to be cancelled in order to improve company’s effectiveness. Such decision was made after thorough analysis of personnel use. Also airport’s management intended to invest more than CZK 2.3 billion into development of its infrastructure and extension of its capacity.

The name of the investor who would invest into Ruzyne International will be announced by the end of this year. Mr. Dvorak said that “the price of the airport should correspond to the total of the sum of a loan, which investors are able to obtain for the purchase of the airport, and a market price of airports on the bourse.” Among the possible investors he listed airport operators, infrastructure funds and financial institutions.

Photo: by Honza Groh (wikimedia.org)

Date: 14/01/2009