German airline giant Lufthansa is being removed from the country’s benchmark blue-chip index DAX of which the company has been a constituent since the gauge's inception in 1988, the stock market said Thursday.
Lufthansa will be replaced by real estate company Deutsche Wohnen AG in the DAX Index, Deutsche Borse said in a statement. The change will come into effect on June 22.
The share price for Lufthansa, a DAX member since the bourse was set up in 1988, had started to fall well before the pandemic.
But it plunged with the crisis, which saw almost all of the group's passenger operations come to a halt.
Lufthansa said it would undergo "far-reaching" restructuring as it posted a first-quarter net loss of 2.1 billion euros ($2.3 billion) on Wednesday.
The first quarter loss, which compares to a net loss of 342 million euros in the year-earlier period, was driven by write-downs of 266 million euros on its fleet, as well as write-downs on the book value of catering business LSG North America by 100 million and on budget unit Eurowings by 57 million, the carrier said on Wednesday.
A slump in fuel hedging contracts was another 950 million euro burden on the bottom line.
Lufthansa, which had grounded almost all its aircraft at the height of the pandemic, confirmed a loss before interest and tax of 1.2 billion euros during the first three months of the year, first reported in April.
The group's non-executive board on Monday approved a 9 billion euro ($10 billion) government bailout that will force it to cede some of its prized landing slots to rivals.
Lufthansa Group, which includes Swiss, Austrian Airlines and Brussels Airlines, suffered a 98% slump in April passenger numbers from the year-earlier month to 241,000.
But it laid out plans on Wednesday to increase the offered capacity in September to reach 40% of what it had scheduled before the crisis.
