{"id":485829,"date":"2021-04-26T07:26:37","date_gmt":"2021-04-26T05:26:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=485829"},"modified":"2021-04-26T08:33:39","modified_gmt":"2021-04-26T06:33:39","slug":"mango-faces-grounding-from-this-week-as-its-hit-by-financial-crunch-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/business\/485829\/mango-faces-grounding-from-this-week-as-its-hit-by-financial-crunch-report\/","title":{"rendered":"Mango faces grounding this week as it’s hit by financial crunch: report"},"content":{"rendered":"

State-owned domestic airline Mango says that it cannot pay staff salaries, raising questions about how much longer it can stay in the air.<\/p>\n

The airline’s financial issues have been exacerbated by delayed funding from government, with the Department of Public Enterprises meeting with Mango’s board this weekend about repositioning the airline,\u00a0BusinessDay<\/a><\/strong> reported.<\/p>\n

The delay in funding means that the airline will need to stop operating from 1 May – and enter into business rescue.<\/p>\n

A Mango spokesperson said that the airline is expecting some of the R10.5 billion set aside for South African Airways (SAA), but that will require a special appropriation bill, which has not yet been tabled in parliament.<\/p>\n

This is the second state-owned airline to be hit with financial problems in as many years, with SAA entering into business rescue in December 2019.<\/p>\n

SAA has been unprofitable for almost a decade, surviving on state bailouts and government debt guarantees, and was placed under administration a year ago. The carrier has been lying dormant since March 2020, when the fleet was grounded due to travel bans to contain the Covid-19 coronavirus.<\/p>\n

However, SAA’s new interim chief executive Thomas Kgokolo said that the embattled national carrier has begun official discussions to resume operations.<\/p>\n

In an interview last week, Kgokolo said that the airline will soon start the process of retraining its pilots and ensuring that compliance requirements are met.<\/p>\n

He added that a number of expenses have been cut down, including employee costs through retrenchments, meaning that the new airline will be significantly \u2018leaner\u2019.<\/p>\n

However, Kgokolo acknowledged the difficulties in restarting the airline during a global pandemic which has caused untold damage to the airline sector.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur view is that we are much smaller than before, so we are going to be spending a lot of time (as part of) our restart plan looking at operational efficiency from a cost perspective.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe will also be looking at the type of aircraft we use going forward to ensure that they are fuel-efficient. We will also (launch) a decent marketing campaign to ensure that as we come back online our loyal customers can use us again.<\/p>\n

Kgokolo said that this restart will not be easy and that the new SAA will not do things the same way it did in the past.<\/p>\n

\n

Read: \u2018New SAA\u2019 plans to restart operations<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

State-owned domestic airline Mango says that it cannot pay staff salaries, raising questions about how much longer it can stay in the air.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":463618,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9872],"tags":[26,2476],"class_list":["post-485829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-headline","tag-mango"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485829"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485829\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":485903,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485829\/revisions\/485903"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/463618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}