Lufthansa is positive that it can attain the operating profit of last year even with high costs of fuel, and will make use of the crisis facing airline companies to look at acquisitions, the carrier's chief finance officer said.
"Matching the 2007 results will be ambitious, but we are convinced that we will be still be able to reach it", Stephan Gemkow, Lufthansa CFO, revealed it to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in an interview that appeared on Monday.
The carrier has said that it is intending to match at least the 1.38 billion euros in operating profits it achieved a year ago, and its chief executive Wolfgang Mayrhuber said previously this month that high costs of fuel had reduced the scope for the company to do better than it did previous year.
The airline's financial chief said that he expected the prices of crude oil to be between $80 and $120 a barrel in the second half of the year.
However, US light crude was trading above $136 a barrel on Monday.
Gemkow further said that the high prices fuel was forcing the sector to reduce capacity, an effect already seen in both America and Asia.
He said, "The crisis is strengthening the strong and weakening the weak", and added that this made it an appropriate time to examine acquisitions not only of the British carrier bmi, but also of airlines that are not members of the Star Alliance team.
