Alaska Airlines is still waiting for the federal government to approve its merger with Virgin Airlines.<\/p>\n
In a conference call with investment analysts on Thursday morning, Alaska Air Group CEO Brad Tilden said the company has the money and the willingness, but it doesn\u2019t yet have federal permission.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs to timing, we were hoping to get this done a couple of weeks ago, and we\u2019re obviously not quite there yet,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to predict the exact timing of when we\u2019ll wrap up.\u201d<\/p>\n
The merger of Virgin Airlines and Alaska Airlines was announced April 4 and has been in the works since. It would create the nation\u2019s fifth-largest airline, but the U.S. Department of Justice is considering the merger on antitrust grounds, as it does with all significant proposed mergers.<\/p>\n
Alaska Air Group includes Horizon Air, and the merger would put Virgin alongside Alaska and Horizon in the Air Group parent company.<\/p>\n
Tilden said he is \u201cconfident the deal will get done\u201d and called the move a \u201cpro-consumer merger of two smaller airlines.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the end of the third quarter, Alaska Air Group reported having $3.2 billion in available cash to prosecute the merger, including $1.5 billion it borrowed specifically for the process.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt this point, we\u2019re fully prepared to close the deal once we have DOJ approval,\u201d said Brandon Pedersen, Alaska Air Group\u2019s chief financial officer.<\/p>\n
Tilden said he was unable to talk about the merger in detail, including whether or not there are conditions that would stop the merger.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe do have a pretty strong internal compass about what\u2019s worked for us and what will work for us in the future,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Tilden\u2019s statements came as the company announced its third-quarter earnings. Its net income of $256 million during the period was down from $274 million during the same period last year, but in the year to date, the company has reported $700 million in net income as compared to $657 million during the first nine months of 2015.<\/p>\n
\u201c2016 is shaping up to be a year of record profitability,\u201d Tilden said.<\/p>\n
According to statistics provided by the company, Alaska Air Group had flown 25.5 million passengers in 2016 as of the end of September, compared with about 24 million during the first nine months of 2015.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Alaska Airlines is still waiting for the federal government to approve its merger with Virgin Airlines. In a conference call with investment analysts on Thursday morning, Alaska Air Group CEO Brad Tilden said the company has the money and the willingness, but it doesn\u2019t yet have federal permission. \u201cAs to timing, we were hoping to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":426,"featured_media":33526,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-33525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/426"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33525\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33525"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=33525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}