The trading week ended on Friday with a neat setback.

The specifications from Asia had already indicated where the journey would also go in Europe and the USA: downwards.

The German leading index Dax collapsed by a good 3 percent to 15,376 points right at the start of trading.

Timo Kotowski

Editor in business.

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Inken Schönauer

Editor in business, responsible for the financial market.

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The news about the new Corona virus variant from South Africa caused great uncertainty among investors.

During the course of the day it became known that she had apparently already turned up in Belgium.

Even before the virus news, there was speculation about new lockdowns that could be imposed on vaccinated and unvaccinated people alike.

RKI boss Lothar Wieler and the Federal Minister of Health Jens Spahn had said that vaccinations alone could not break the fourth wave.

Industry saw itself on the upswing

Aviation was hit particularly hard on the stock exchange.

The share of Deutsche Lufthansa was the biggest loser in the M-Dax with a price slide of 12 percent in the meantime.

This was followed by the papers of the airport group Fraport, which lost more than 9 percent in value.

The fact that Germany classified South Africa as a virus variant area meant that returnees - including those who had been vaccinated - had to be in quarantine for 14 days.

Airlines are only allowed to transport German citizens to the Federal Republic.

Other countries such as Great Britain and France initially interrupted air traffic to South Africa.

Air France-KLM and the British Airways parent company IAG recorded heavy losses, the papers of the low-cost airline Ryanair were also in a downward spiral, although the Irish do not offer any long-haul flights.

Overall, the losses in South Africa traffic are small for companies.

Analysts see the real test just ahead, as airlines have prepared for a weaker winter.

The decisive factor will be how quickly booking activity will pick up in 2022.

Meanwhile, investors fear that the virus variant will spread quickly.

The industry had recently seen an upswing after the US lifted entry restrictions for vaccinated Europeans.

Vaccine manufacturers are winning strong

While aviation stocks and banks were among the big losers, there were also winners.

Investors courageously took hold of suppliers of coronavirus vaccines.

Shares in the German biotech company BioNTech rose at times by almost 16 percent.

In the USA, the titles of the development partner Pfizer won vigorously.

The courses of the competitors Moderna and Novavax also increased.

The shares of the pharmaceutical company Merck & Co, which, like Pfizer, offers a drug for the treatment of corona patients, were also among the winners.

In Germany, the usual values ​​from lockdown times were also positive.

The price of the software provider Teamviewer rose just as much as that of the food supplier Delivery Hero or the Internet pharmacy Shop Apotheke.

Lufthansa continues to fly

How big the fear of a damper is in the aviation industry is also shown by the fact that the Lufthansa share is already more than 40 percent below its high of this year. The group is therefore endeavoring to limit the damage: "Lufthansa continues to fly to South Africa, also to take Germans home and transport cargo," it says. It goes 17 times a week from Frankfurt or Munich to South Africa, nine times from Switzerland. There are also five Eurowings Discover flights to neighboring Namibia. Nobody has been deleted yet.

Lufthansa is likely to bet that the group is currently a monopoly with direct flights between central Europe and southern Africa.

German passengers who wanted to return home via London with British Airways, for example, could switch to Lufthansa at short notice because of the cancellations there.

At the beginning of the 2020 pandemic, European airlines had suspended most long-haul flights.

Returnees found alternatives at Qatar Airways, among others, which handled regular returnees through its hub in Doha.

I don't suppose that should happen again.

In addition, cargo holds on the lower deck are currently well filled due to the bottlenecks in cargo shipping.