Spain Business
Spain Business Brief - Friday May 16 2008
By h.b.
May 16, 2008 - 12:43 PM

The services sector in Spain has seen a slow down for the first quarter of the year for the first time in five years. Income is down by 5% compared to last year, with the early Easter holiday ensuring that tourism was the only area of the sector which escaped a fall.
Trade saw the largest fall by 6.6%, followed by transport, company services and information technology.
The only region of Spain to see growth in the sector over the quarter was Asturias, while Navarra saw numbers down by more than 10%, according to the numbers released today by the National Statistics Institute, INE.

The Afirma company has announced profits of 70 million following the fusion between Rayet Promoción and Landscape. The company previously known as Astroc would have shown a 16% loss at 48 million € without the deal, with income down 50% at 84 million.
Other real estate company Colonial has announced losses of 272 million €, because of the depreciation of assets, and sales of property by the main estate agents in the country for the first quarter are 73% lower than a year ago.
Caixa Cataluña today has claimed that house prices in Madrid will fall this year by 6.6%, while across the country the average price fall will be 2.2% Valencia is the other area expected to see the largest falls.

It’s an all-time high for diesel for the fifth consecutive week this week, with the cost of filling the average tank now costing 14 € more than a year ago with a litre now costing 1,21.8 € and that means filling the average tank costs 67 €.
The price of 95 octane petrol is also up at 1,18.6 €

The Euribor interest rate used to set most mortgages in Spain continues to climb, reaching close to 5% on its daily index – at 4.989%. It’s the highest it has been since December 2000.

The Catalan regional government, La Generalitat, and a group of Catalan investors, are negotiating the creation of a public and private consortium to bid for Spanair. The news was given by the President of Tourism in Barcelona, Joan Gaspart, who said that Barcelona airport had a serious problem with airlines, and that this was the last chance to have their own Catalan company of the importance of Spanair, the second largest commercial airline operating in the Spanish market.
Meanwhile the increased losses by Vueling announced yesterday are said to be complicating merger plans with Clickair. Vueling, run by the Lara family, has decided to cut 14 routes, most of them from Madrid and Paris, and has reduced costs by reducing the number of planes from 24 to 21.