TAP's final bids land today, and only Air France-KLM and Lufthansa are still in the race
The deadline for binding bids for 49.9% of TAP falls on 29 July. Two bidders remain, Parpública spends August on the analysis, and the government decides in early September.
Today is the day TAP’s privatisation stops being talk and turns into signed paper. Wednesday is the deadline for binding bids for the 49.9% stake the Portuguese state has decided to sell, and only two names are left on the table: Air France-KLM and Lufthansa.
Binding means what it sounds like. These are no longer intentions or scenarios — they are a price and a commitment the bidder is stuck with.
When will we know who is buying TAP?
Not today. Once the bids are in, Parpública has August to analyse them, and the government expects to decide in late August or early September. After that comes the usual road for deals like this, with competition clearances and formalities that do not wrap up in a week.
Both bidders were invited in April and given 90 days from Parpública’s letter to respond, which is how today’s date came about — a deadline that has been in the diary since mid-July. In between there was a final round of meetings in Lisbon with the two groups’ chief executives — the last check-in before the bags close.
How far apart are the two industrial offers?
According to the government, barely at all. Ministers have repeatedly described the two industrial proposals as equivalent — routes, hub, commitments to Lisbon and to the brand — and said that price will therefore be decisive. That sentence carries more than it looks: when two plans tie on paper, the tiebreak is in euros.
For Portugal, the practical difference between the two buyers is mostly about which network TAP ends up feeding. Air France-KLM pulls towards Paris and Amsterdam, Lufthansa towards Frankfurt and Munich. Whatever gets written down about the Lisbon hub and the Brazil and Africa routes matters far more than any press release.
Why is the state only selling half?
Because the government approved the sale of 49.9%, keeping the state as majority shareholder and stating openly that the goal is to recover part of the public money poured into the airline during its restructuring. The terms are set out in the government’s official statement on the final stage of the privatisation.
It is the heaviest economic file of the Portuguese summer, and it lands at a moment when the country’s big corporate results have been cheerful — Galp closed the first half with 812 million euros in profit and raised its dividend on top. TAP is playing a different game: convincing somebody to pay well for half of it.
By Beatriz Mota
Image: Adam Moreira (AEMoreira042281) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
