National Aviation Services (NAS) has acquired a 51% stake in Siginon Group’s subsidiary, Siginon Aviation, an airport ground handling and cargo management service provider.
Through this partnership, NAS intends to expand its presence in Africa with two airports in Kenya – Nairobi and Eldoret. Alongside these additions, NAS has begun operations at 14 new airports across South Africa, DRC, Guinea Bissau and Zambia in the last year.
In the last decade, Siginon Aviation focused on improving its ground handling capacity through building a new air cargo terminal and acquiring ramp equipment to boost its operations in JKIA, Nairobi.
Commenting on the partnership, Hassan El-Houry, CEO of NAS, said, “With the ongoing vaccine requirements around the world, we also handled almost a million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine at different African airports. With this growing demand, we expanded our focus on cargo management in Africa and the partnership with Siginon Aviation is indeed timely.”
El-Houry also highlighted, “In 2018, we committed to investing US$50m into the African aviation sector over a period of three years. With the pandemic, the global aviation industry suffered a major slowdown and NAS experienced an 85% drop in revenue. Despite the challenges, we remained focused on our commitment to the sector and thrived during a very difficult period. This is greatly because of the exceptional goodwill we built with all our stakeholders – our employees, customers, partners and governments, all mutually supporting each other during this difficult time.”