The brand name of Adria Airways, Slovenia’s former flag carrier, has been sold to an unnamed foreign investor. The sale price was $40,000, an absurdly low amount for what was, at the time of its bankruptcy, a 58-year old airline. It reflects the reputation the airline had in its final few months of operations.
Adria Airways brand finally sold
A year and a half following the collapse of Adria Airways, the bankruptcy administrator has finally found a buyer for the Adria Airways brand. As reported by Slovenia’s state news agency today, the price was just over €33,000 ($40,000).
The Adria Airways brand name has been on sale for a while. This week’s successful sale concludes the third attempt to sell the brand. It attracted nine bids, four of which are foreign. The asking price for the auction was €10,000 or $12,250.
In previous rounds, the asking price was much higher. In round one, which attracted the preliminary interest of only one potential bidder but ultimately had no bids, the auction started at €100,000 ($122,500). In the second round, this was halved to €50,000 ($61,125) but there were no bidders again. The third round, just a tenth of the original asking price, finally produced a buyer.
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Multiple Adria Airways assets are on sale
The Adria Airways brand is not the first of Adria’s assets to be sold. The auction was part of a wider sell-off of the airline’s assets as part of bankruptcy proceedings being conducted in Slovenia. A total of €88 million ($107 million) of claims need to be met. The process is complicated because Adria’s assets are valued at a significantly lower amount of €6 million ($7 million).
As Simple Flying reported at the time, The Institute for the Constitutional System and Human Rights purchased the Adria Airways Flight School together with a Chinese businessman called Kai Dai. They paid a mere €7,500 ($9,100) for it.
The Head of the Institute, Peter Jambrek, said at the time that he intends to turn the flight school into Adria Aviation Academy. He wants this to become the biggest flight school in the world. He said,
“We are targeting a large pool of countries – in China for instance there is a tremendous shortage of pilots, and the same is true in India, Indonesia”
The AOC is owned by The King Of Bananas
Adria Airways’ Air Operator Certificate was auctioned off a year ago. The buyer is the regional “King of Bananas”, a Montenegrin businessman who specializes in importing and exporting bananas. It was presumed, at the time, that the King would be establishing a new airline in Slovenia with this AOC, but this has not materialized.
Among other assets, 20 former Adria Airways CRJ900 aircraft were also on sale, all together as a single package and also through an auction. The starting price for this package was €1,500 ($1,750) in August 2020.
In March 2020, 1,734 Adria Airways uniforms were put on sale, also through an auction. The starting price was €50,000 ($59,000), but this attracted no purchases, and so no money was made from this asset.
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