Togo’s ASKY Airlines holds out for financial assistance

West Africa’s ASKY Airlines (KP, Lomé) is still holding out for financial injections from lenders and shareholders but remains confident about its future while consolidating its operations, according to Commercial and Ground Operations Director, Nowel Ngala. “The project itself is not in doubt, but this period is not conducive to conquering new markets. We will first consolidate our current routes,” Ngala told The Africa Report. He said the Togo-based airline has sought help from the World Bank, the African Development Bank, and several commercial lenders. “We knocked on all the doors, undertook all possible and imaginable steps, but we haven’t yet found a solution, he said. However, he said, the company’s management refused to give up and had now sought help from its shareholders, which “may offer financial support”. ASKY’s shareholders include strategic partner Ethiopian Airlines (ET, Addis Ababa) (40%), Ecobank, the West African Development Bank (Banque Ouest Africaine de Développement – BOAD), South Africa’s Sakhumnotho Group Holding, and other West and Central African private investors. Like airlines worldwide, ASKY has been hard hit by the pandemic’s fall-out. The carrier’s operations in 2020 fell by 45% compared to 2019. Between March and August 2020, the airline’s operations were restricted to charter operations for the United Nations Humanitarian Air Service (Brindisi) in West Africa which involved mobilising three passenger aircraft from Accra, Ghana, as well as operating cargo flights to bring COVID-19 health equipment to West Africa. Despite resuming commercial operations on August 3, ASKY operated at 27% capacity between September and October 2020. “We had to adapt to the anti-COVID-19 protocols put in place by various countries, review our flight plans according to the curfews introduced, reduce our number of flights to certain countries in order to respect their guidelines, such as Cameroon, Gabon and Nigeria… it wasn’t easy,” said Ngala. However, he remained optimistic about the company’s future. “I am confident about ASKY’s future because we were on the right track – 2019 was the most profitable year in our company’s history, and we started 2020 with two equally promising months. This is what has enabled us – alongside the UN contract – to have made it until now without any redundancies or salary cuts,” he said. The company has 475 employees of 32 different nationalities. According to the ch-aviation schedules module, the carrier on April 11 cancelled the planned launch of direct services between Cotonou (Benin) and Niamey (Niger); and Lomé and Johannesburg O.R. Tambo. Its fleet comprises five B737-700s and four B737-800s, according to the ch-aviation fleets advanced module, all of which are leased from Ethiopian. Created in 2010, the airline in 2015 had reported its first profit “a year behind our initial projections because of the Ebola crisis,” Ngala said. Following a difficult 2016 “due to a shortage of pilots worldwide which made it impossible for us to operate all the flights we had scheduled”, the company had become profitable again from 2017 to 2019, growing each year by 3% to 5% until it had reached a turnover of XOF95 billion CFA francs (USD174.7 million), he said.