Apollo’s Sun Country Air to revive IPO plans

Bloomberg

Apollo Global Management Inc’s Sun Country Airlines is planning to restart its push for an initial public offering as soon as next year if travel demand picks up across the industry, said the carrier’s top executive.
Sun Country’s core business of taking Midwest leisure travellers to Florida, Las Vegas and other warm-weather destinations has already recovered enough to turn in a profitable summer, Chief Executive Officer Jude Bricker said.
The airline’s charter work for sports teams and casinos is bouncing back, and the company began cargo service in May for Amazon.com Inc.
“We’re going to fly as many flights in October as we flew
in February,” Bricker said in
a Zoom interview from the annual International Aviation Forecast Summit in Cincinnati. “We’re in the sweet spot of everything that could be good about owning an airline right now but we need to see a recovery of airline traffic.”
Bricker’s upbeat view suggests at least the potential for a revival of Sun Country’s IPO plans despite industry devastation caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Apollo acquired the airline in December 2017 after Bricker began implementing a low-cost strategy by cutting expenses and adding seats to the aircraft.
Profits surged and Sun Country began preparing for an IPO as soon as April 2020 — only for the pandemic to dash those plans.
Even now, “explaining an outperformance in passenger strength in the market could be difficult” without a sustained rebound across the industry, Bricker acknowledged.