BAA bought Budapest Airport in December 2005. In the report, BAA CEO Mike Clasper called Budapest Airport “a fast-growing, commercially underdeveloped airport that is a perfect fit for our management skills.”
”In our short tenure of Budapest we have already made significant progress towards running the airport to the BAA model and integrating it within BAA’s portfolio of airports,” he said. Clasper noted that BAA decided to buy Budapest Airport because it lacked a big presence on a foreign market. BAA aims to use its capacity for productivity and profit-growing to make Budapest Airport into a BAA unit which is just as valuable as Gatwick, he said.