In air traffic, we have high state-imposed location costs, but also the inherent location costs, particularly the high wage levels in Germany. Among the state-imposed costs are the air traffic tax, the air security fee, and the costs for air navigation services. The state-imposed costs for the departure of an Airbus A320 on a medium-distance flight at 80% occupancy amount to about 4,800 euros, while in other European countries, it is often much less. For example, in Istanbul and Madrid, it's only around 500 to 700 euros. On intra-European routes, this means that Germany's state costs are about 30 euros per passenger, compared to around 10 euros in other European countries. That might sound like a small amount initially, but it has a significant impact in low-cost traffic. These airlines generate a large part of the demand through price, and a 20 euros difference in „production costs“ per passenger or seat, which is about 60 euros for a 1,000 km flight, is substantial. This leads low-cost carriers to quickly shift a large part of their aircraft from high-cost locations to countries with lower location costs. We have seen this in Germany, where low-cost airlines have significantly reduced their offerings.

Not for the customers. When low-cost carriers leave the market, it leads to less competition and thus to rising ticket prices. These prices are already high due to the state-imposed location costs and high wage costs, and they continue to rise as competition decreases. This negatively affects demand. As a result, the recovery of air traffic in Germany is significantly slower compared to other European countries. There is a gap of over 20 percentage points between Germany and the rest of Europe compared to the pre-Covid situation. In 2024, passenger numbers in Germany were 17% below the 2019 levels, while in Europe, passenger numbers were already slightly above the 2019 levels.

With T3, we can handle about 10 million more passengers than with T2. So, this change will significantly increase capacity overnight.

At T1 and T2, we have a maximum capacity of just over 70 million, but in 2024, we only had 61 million passengers, which is almost 10 million fewer than in 2019, before the Covid pandemic. The significant increase in capacity is good for long-term growth. Starting in 2026, a stable increase in demand can gradually fill the new T3. You don't fill such a terminal from day one, that would be bad planning.

Fortunately, we have some flexibility in influencing the timeline of the core renovation. For the first time, we are not being driven by tight capacity. After the comprehensive planning phase, the construction work will certainly take between 6 and 8 years. The higher the passenger growth rate, the faster and shorter the construction phase will be.

It will be over 1 billion euros, including planning, stretched over 8 to 10 years. The top priority is also to minimize investment.

Exactly. Every year we have a kind of baseline investment, mainly for maintenance. If you exclude the construction projects in Lima and Frankfurt, which are finite, we always have around 500 million euros per year across all 30 airports in our portfolio. And this baseline will include the T2 renovation, which could go slightly over the 500 million euros mark during the construction years. This is not much in comparison to the over 4 billion euros for T3 and the roughly 2 billion euros that we invested in Lima.

I believe that for the fiscal year 2026, we will return to a payout ratio of 40 to 60% of net income. For 2025, a dividend payout is not ruled out, but if it happens, it will likely be under 40% of net income.

No, this ratio will not be reached in 2026. We will improve each year, but we won’t be at 5 next year.

No. A large portion of our investors, who are part of the free float, are institutional investors from Australia and the US. They all know that investments in infrastructure companies are long-term investments. Some are indifferent to dividends, as they focus on value and stock price increases, but some want dividends just because they see it as a sign from management that they have confidence in their own financial goals. Our state investors, the city of Frankfurt and the state of Hessen, are interested in resuming dividend payments.

One reason is that passenger development didn’t go as expected in the industry at the time. We’ve already discussed the reasons for that. The second significant reason is labour costs. In the past, we had assumed about 3% annual collective wage increases, including structural effects, for the Frankfurt location, and this had been mostly accurate for over ten years. Then came disproportionately high collective wage increases after the pandemic, especially in the lower wage groups. This meant we had to absorb massive increases in personnel costs, which we couldn’t fully pass on through price increases. The wage increases were about 10% per year recently, which means about 100 million euros more per year at the Frankfurt location. Additionally, construction price increases in recent years were also disproportionately high, which increased CapEx amounts.

During the pandemic, we raised liquidity to 5 billion euros and are now at just under 4 billion euros. That will continue to decrease, but a bit slower than originally planned. The reason is the favourable interest rate curve for us. Due to the inversion of the yield curve, we had a good interest result because of the relatively high interest rates on our liquidity holdings. However, we intend to gradually decrease them 2 billion euros in the long term. That is the minimum level at which we feel comfortable in the long term.

A large portion of the improvement in results over the past period came from international business. In the last 10 years, the annual Ebitda contribution from international business has improved by over 400 million euros. With relatively high passenger growth rates at our participating airports, we will continue to grow organically here. Additionally, there are always some interesting tenders in the market, but due to our level of debt, larger investments in this area are not possible. But smaller acquisitions are certainly not ruled out.

Theoretically, such an event can always happen, but the question is how likely it is. We have a ring network in Frankfurt, with two suppliers – Mainova and Syna – and if one fails, there is an automatic switch to the other. Hence, we have full redundancy. Given that, we still have very high security. For many systems, like IT, we have at least simple redundancy, and for very security-critical systems, there is usually double redundancy. But there is never 100% security.

We are attacked every day. The curve of the number of attacks is steep. The awareness of the danger is present at the affected companies, and there is massive ramping up of defenses. This naturally leads to significant costs. We have heavily increased personnel in the IT department to counter this. By the way, we’ve been observing this trend not just since the start of the war in Ukraine, though it has intensified since then.

An airport is a chain of processes, and if someone deliberately removes one link, it immediately causes operational disruptions.