Mozambique Airlines (LAM) announced on Monday 26 August that it intends to acquire four more aircraft to meet growing demand and make the market more competitive at domestic and regional level.
In July this year, a ‘one-off overhaul’ of its largest aircraft (a Boeing 737-700) forced the company to reschedule several flights, receiving complaints and criticism from several customers.
Meanwhile, speaking on the sidelines of the opening of the 59th Maputo International Fair (FACIM 2024), the institution’s chairmans, Américo Muchanga, explained that two more Boeing 137 and two Embraer 145 aircraft will be acquired, recalling that LAM currently has only six planes.
With regard to earnings, he said that in the first quarter the company made a total of 3.7 billion meticals, and that he expects growth of 19 per cent in the coming period.
In the same period, the company carried a total of 330,000 passengers on domestic, regional and intercontinental services. ‘We expected to have carried 500,000’.
LAM operates 12 destinations on the domestic market, regularly flying regionally to Johannesburg, Dar es Salaam, Harare, Lusaka and Cape Town, with Lisbon being the only intercontinental destination.
‘We intend to maintain the Maputo-Lisbon route. We’re working on it. We want to operate this route by creating the conditions for it to be sustainable and for it to generate, shall we say, operational profit,’ he said.
Américo Muchanga has been president of LAM since July, having replaced Theunis Christian de Klerk Crous, who had been in the role on an interim basis since February, as part of the removal of João Carlos Pó Jorge and the company’s restructuring process, which is being carried out by Fly Modern Ark (FMA), the South African company hired to recover the airline.
