eVTOL aircraft developer Lilium has appointed accountants KPMG to find buyers for the company as part of the administration process it entered last week.
According to Lilium KPMG will conduct an open, transparent and fair process, with the first briefings with potential investors to start soon.
Last week Lilium, which is a public company listed in the USA with its headquarters in the Netherlands and most of its operations in Munich, announced that the two subsidiaries that run its German operations were filing for administration.
The high-profile insolvency followed the refusal of a €100 million (US$109 million) loan by the German Federal and Bavarian regional Governments.
Since the insolvency filing, a local court has appointed to the German subsidiaries’ boards of management two lawyers, Gerrit Hölzle and Thorsten Bieg as chief insolvency officers to oversee the reorganization of Lilium’s German subsidiaries and attorney Ivo-Meinert Willrodt as the provisional custodian.
In addition, yesterday Lilium’s board authorized the Netherlands-registered public company to file for insolvency. It is expected that the value of the company’s shares on the NASDAQ stock exchange will fall further when trading is suspended tomorrow.
Lilium CEO Klaus Roewe said, “With the support of our appointed custodian and the restructuring experts, we at Lilium remain fully focused on re-emerging following restructuring, with fresh investment to support the all-electric Lilium Jet’s path to certification and entry into service.”
Lilium employs more than 1,000 people and has said that work is continuing at its German subsidiaries towards the first flight tests of a full-scale version of its Jet eVTOL aircraft. The company had planned to construct six test aircraft to progress through to EASA certification and an entry-into-service during 2026.
Two Lilium Jets are on the final assembly line in Germany, with the first aircraft having recently completed the initial low-voltage power-on, and due to advance shortly into the ground testing phase. At the end of October, Lilium engineers also moved a fully assembled, conforming Lilium Jet airframe into a static test rig for structural testing.
The fuselage and wings of a third aircraft are currently in assembly at aerostructures suppliers Aciturri and Aernnova.
Lilium said it has firm orders, reservations, options, and memoranda of understanding for more than 780 Lilium Jets to operators around the world.
