T.C. | Eduardo Abenojar, president of the Restaurant and Nightlife Association of Salou (a small tourist town 100 km from Barcelona, considered the capital of the Costa Dorada) began a hunger strike yesterday at 12.30 pm to ask the Generalitat to reopen his business because “we have neither help nor hope”.
T.C. | Faced with the impossibility of reaching a sufficient parliamentary agreement (it requires an agreement with the opposition) to renew the members of the General Council of the Judiciary, which has been in office for two years, the coalition government of the PSOE and UP passed a rapid reform that ties the Council’s hands and feet and prevents it from making appointments while it is in office. Thus, it is a Council “in functions” but unable to function.
T.C.| The large Spanish hotel chains are seeking liquidity by selling assets and are opting for the ‘sale & leaseback’ option to maintain management. According to Meliá’s director of real estate, Mark Hoddinott, the group is identifying assets worth between 150 and 200 million. NH, the Spanish chain controlled by the Thai group Minor, is also considering the sale and leaseback of several hotels. According to Moody’s, the group expects to generate more than 200 million in additional cash. RIU, a partner of the German group TUI, has three hotels for sale: in Madeira (Portugal), Lanzarote (Spain) and Panama with a combined valuation of around 250 million euros.
Fernando Rodríguez | “Tourism, energy, food…In those sectors where we have people with a lot of knowledge and we are leaders, we should use the recovery funds to invest in technology to be stronger and more competitive. I think it is very difficult to transform a society from one day to the next and create companies that generate employment in sectors completely new. Our transformation must be gradual. We must take advantage of European funds to make an intelligent change of our strengths”, says Emma Fernández, board member of Metrovacesa, Asti and Axway.
Bankinter | The Vodafone and Orange alliance aims to gain size to become an alternative to the big players in the sector, Cellnex and American Tower. The latter recently landed in Europe after the purchase of Telefónica’s towers. The sum of the towers that both groups would contribute to the new “infraco” would be 17,000 sites. It would become the leader in the Spanish market, surpassing Telxius (10,000 towers) and Cellnex (9,000).
The unstoppable spread of the pandemic is currently hitting Portugal and Spain with particular severity. And it has been worsened with possible delays in the production of vaccines, both by Pfizer and Astrazeneca, thus jeopardizing the pace of deliveries and the vaccination schedule in Europe. At the same time, the short term is being complicated on the continent by the increase in the number and depth of restrictions. These are weakening the prospects for recovery in the first part of the year.
Fernando Rodriguez | Sustainable investment in Spain amounted to 285,454 million euros in 2019, up 36% on the previous year, according to ‘Spainsif 2020 Study: Sustainable and Responsible Investment in Spain’. The study was prepared with the answers to a questionnaire provided by 76% of Spanish investment companies and 43% of international ones operating in Spain. 72.8% of the total figure – €207,571 million- is managed by Spanish companies, up 9% on the previous year.
Bonds from the European Union have become popular among Japanese investors. Already in July, Japanese funds bought record amount of Italian debt. However in September, they purchased a net 235 billion yen ($2.15 billion) of Spanish bonds, while selling a net 127.7 billion yen of Italian paper during the month, the data from Japan’s Ministry of Finance showed.
Economists are getting used to expecting the unexpected. The unprecedented fall in Spain’s GDP—seen during the first half of the year—was followed by one of the highest growth rates ever recorded. In the third quarter of the year, quarterly GDP growth was around 14%. The unusual extent of the growth seen during the recovery is mirrored by the atypical way in which it has taken shape. Growth is expected to return to more ‘normal’ levels in the fourth quarter, i.e. about 2%. While this rate is high in comparison with any quarter in Spain’s recent history, it indicates a sharp slowdown.
Indicators for the real estate market show a significant recovery in activity in the sector, following the standstill during the state of alarm. On the demand side, home sales recovered well in July and increased by 20% month-on-month, although in cumulative terms for the year to date there is still a year-on-year decline of 25.8%. On the supply side, the construction sector has also quickly restarted its activity. In August, cement consumption was only 2.1% below the level of August last year, with a notable recovery from the 50% fall registered in April.