"2020 has been one of our most challenging years, but despite $2.8 billion of losses and shrinking to passenger levels we haven't seen since the 1970s... we can be hopeful for 2021, with Britain on the cusp of becoming the first country in the world to safely resume international travel."

Heathrow Airport chief executive John Holland-Kaye is sounding an optimistic note about a recovery in the travel industry despite Europe's second-biggest airport reporting the "devastating" impact of COVID-19 on annual results. 

Tuesday brought a jump in travel and leisure stocks as the UK government spelled out plans to reopen the skies in May, and the hope is that holiday-hungry Britons could save Heathrow and other airports like it from another lost year in 2021. 

Elsewhere, the gleaming towers of Canary Wharf and financial districts around the world may be home to fewer bankers in the years to come. Revealing a 72 percent plunge in profits last year, Lloyds Banking Group has become the latest of the big lenders to announce a major review of its costly property portfolio. However, our graphic below shows that once again the pandemic is accelerating a trend in the industry that was there long before COVID-19 broke out.

After an apparent victory by Australia over Big Tech, European publishers are pushing regulators closer to home to get tough on the issue of revenue sharing. EU Competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager says the situation in Australia is "a question of copyright." But with reining in the power of the Silicon Valley giants now a goal for governments everywhere, the issue shows no sign of going away. See our film for the latest.

And how many dollar millionaires are there in your city?  

Read on for more on this, and the rest of the day's business news in full.

Louise Greenwood,

Digital business correspondent 

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Heathrow airport has reported a loss of $2.8 billion for 2020 and is calling on further government support to help the industry through the continued pandemic conditions. In a disastrous year for aviation globally, the west London airport, Europe's second largest, says the COVID-19 has pushed passenger numbers down to levels not seen since the 1970s. Heathrow management is calling for ongoing support for staff on furlough schemes, cuts to tourist taxes and full business rate relief from the UK finance minister Rishi Sunak as he plans to deliver the Budget on March 3. Revenues for Heathrow fell 62 percent to $1.7 billion as the number of passengers using the airport collapsed from 80.9 million to 22.1 million. 

On Tuesday Prime Minister Boris Johnson released plans to reopen the UK economy from its third national lockdown,  including measures to allow international travel to resume from May 17. The announcement led to a flurry of buying in leisure and travel related stocks on the London markets. However, Heathrow CEO John Holland-Kaye said he sees "a patchwork reopening of long-haul markets depending on the progress of vaccinations" in popular destinations like the U.S., Australia, Thailand and Singapore. Long haul is the mainstay of Heathrow's business, with flights to the U.S. alone accounting for a fifth of all bookings.  

Holland-Kaye added that digital health checks will be vital to a recovery in international flight. Paper checks on travellers are estimated to be adding twenty minutes to check in times at Heathrow and Holland-Kaye described digital health apps as "absolutely critical… and one of the main things that government needs to work on". 

U.S. President Joe Biden is expected to sign an executive order later on Wednesday aimed at addressing the shortage in semiconductor chip shortages. Administration officials say the order will launch a 100-day review of global supply chains for chip and battery components. While U.S. semiconductor firms account for almost half of global chip sales, they are responsible for only 12 percent of production which has been outsourced, mostly to manufacturers in Asia. Biden has been under pressure from lawmakers to invest in domestic production capacity. The Ford Motor Company recently said a lack of chips, essential to EV models, could cut the company's production by up to a fifth in the first quarter while General Motors is cutting output at factories in the United States, Canada and Mexico. In Europe carmakers including Fiat, Nissan and Toyota have done the same.  

The UK's biggest high-street bank Lloyds Banking Group is to close a fifth of its office space over the next two years after revealing a 72 percent plunge in profits last year. Both the fall in profits, from $6.2 billion to $1.7 billion, and the $5.9 billion bad loan allocation for failing businesses were not as severe as predicted. Analysts says the results suggest government furlough policies may have helped more firms avoid bankruptcy in the COVID-19 lockdown than previously thought. Lloyds has also announced plans to resume dividend payment to shareholders after the Bank of England lifted a temporary ban on the practice in December. 

In an internal survey 77 percent of Lloyds staff said they would like to work from home three or more days a week in the future. On Tuesday rival HSBC, in the face of similar losses, unveiled plans to slash almost nine million square feet of office space worldwide, often in prestige locations, for the new era of flexible working. 

Household goods giant Reckitt Benckiser has reported the highest full-year sales growth in its history, as the COVID-19 pandemic led to surging demand for disinfectant and cleaning products. The maker of leading brands like Dettol and Lysol says like for like sales in 2020 rose 11.8 percent to $19.8 billion. In a year described as a "turning point" for the company, sales of home hygiene products were up by a fifth with strong expansion into new markets, and with online sales soaring by 56 percent. Chief executive Laxman Narasimhan says the firm "expects 2021 to be a year of further strategic progress... we will meet our medium-term targets".

Shares in two of China's biggest markets have seen their biggest fall since July after touching record highs last week. The blue-chip CSI300 index was down 3.14 percent to close at 5,597 points on Monday, while the Shanghai Composite fell 1.45 percent to end at 3,642 points. Materials stock led the falls followed by losses in the consumer and healthcare sectors. It comes amid indications that central bank support seen in the pandemic period is slowly easing. 

Chinese private equity firm Boyu Capital is reportedly raising a new Asia-focused fund targeting a capital allocation of $6 billion. The fund will be the fifth and largest U.S. dollar-denominated equity venture from the firm, which has targeted tech startups. 

The Eurozone's largest economy avoided a double-dip recession in the last three months of 2020 according to new figures. GDP in Germany grew 0.3 percent in the final quarter of the year, ahead of estimates of 0.1 percent, with strong performance in construction manufacturing and exports.

Eurozone inflation however is back at its highest point for almost a year according to new figures. Inflation jumped to 0.9 percent last month with higher prices for industrial goods contributing more than 40 percent to the increase, according to data from the EU's main statistical agency Eurostat. Analysts warn a shortage of materials and rising shipping costs is disrupting supply chains for goods, with costs likely to be passed on to consumers later this year. 

The EU has announced plans to upgrade its planned Green Deal to make better use of climate data, reducing the impact of extreme weather conditions. The economic losses for increasingly frequent extreme weather events are averaging at $14 billion a year according to the Commission research. In a statement the EC's executive vice president Frans Timmermans said "There's not going to be climate neutrality in 2050 without a consistent effort into adaptation and mitigation." 

Republic of Korea's Hyundai Motor company is recalling the battery systems in around 82,000 electric vehicles globally over concerns of a potential fire risk. The $900 million recall mostly concerns the Kona EV, Hyundai's biggest-selling electric car. Shares in the firm fell almost 4 percent after South Korea's transport ministry said in a statement that some defects had been found in some battery cells produced at Hyundai supplier LG Energy's factory.

German sportswear giant Puma says sales grew 9.1 percent to $1.85 billion in the fourth quarter, largely on increasing demand in Asia and new celebrity endorsements. Shares fell 3.1 percent on Europe's Stoxx 600 index as boss Chief Executive Bjorn Gulden said in a statement that lockdown conditions in core markets were continuing to drag on sales. But he added that Puma "expects to see an improvement in the second half of the year... people around the world want to do more sports as soon as restrictions allow them to."

Spain's second-largest bank BBVA is considering cutting around 3,000 jobs in its home market, or around 10 percent of its staff, to adapt to the rise in online banking, according to reports. Chief executive Onur Genc has told analysts the lender was looking into cost-cutting plans, "including a fast restructuring program" in Spain, in the first half of 2021. BBVA's net profit in its home market was down 48 percent year on year in the fourth quarter. 

Tech giant Apple has bought a hundred companies over the last six years, according to the company's chief executive Tim Cook. He's told an annual meeting of shareholders that the buyout rate amounts to a new firm every two to three weeks, with acquisitions aimed at smaller tech innovators. Apple recently delivered its most profitable quarter by revenue on record, bringing in $111.4 billion for the three months to the end of December,  a rise of a fifth year on year. 

Women now hold one in three board positions at the UK's 350 biggest listed firms. The FTSE 100 and mid cap 250 both set the target of having a third of board positions held by women by the end of last year, with other countries adopting similarly stringent targets. The number of women on boards has risen by half in the past five years overall, but campaigners say the number of women serving at senior executive level is lagging. 

London has overtaken New York as home to the highest concentration of dollar millionaires in the world according to new data, cementing its role as a top location for the world's rich. The upmarket property consultants Knight Franks says nearly 875,000 Londoners have assets of over a million dollars – that's one in 10 of the population.  

WATCH: The European Union's digital affairs chief has downplayed calls from European media groups to include an Australia-style clause mandating "Big Tech" platforms such as Google and Facebook pay for news. Margrethe Vestager said she believed the situation in Australia was "a question of copyright" and that the bloc's 2019 directive covered payment to content producers. 

The latest UK jobless rate has risen to its highest level in almost five years, up 5.1 percent in the three months to December. Almost three-fifths of those out of work are aged 25 or under. CGTN Europe was joined by Tej Parikh of the Institute of Directors and asked him how the UK's recently announced plans to reopen the economy would affect the recovery in the jobs market. 

The road map to reviving the economy is vital for many businesses because it allows them to do some form of planning now for the year ahead. It makes them think more about rescaling and rehiring, and it obviously gives them some scope for a roadmap out of their current cashflow difficulties. There's a lot of issues for those in the hospitality, leisure and retail sectors, of course, because these are sectors where there's a high level of customer interaction, face to face interaction, which means social distancing and restrictions will continue to affect them. What's crucial now is that the sectors, the ones that open up later, are given additional economic support to see them through some difficult months. 

UK unemployment is now at the highest level for almost five years. How much difference has the government's financial support made to the picture? 

It's always inevitable, as long as restrictions linger on that, the job losses will continue to tick upwards. However, we know that the furlough scheme that the government launched last year has provided a lot of support for businesses and has meant that unemployment hasn't risen further with the vaccine rollout this year and ongoing support for businesses.  We know that the furlough scheme is likely to end at some point in the spring. The budget is due next week and the hope is that the chancellor will extend this for a few more months, at least as long as heightened restrictions remain. But when the scheme does unwind, there's going to be a lot of pressure and ... we may see a slight increase in redundancies when that takes place.

Is it too early to speculate what the long term impact of COVID-19 will be on businesses and workers? 

With the furlough scheme in place at the moment, it's difficult to see the full impact of coronavirus on the labor market, but unemployment is likely to pick up and unfortunately, many individuals have been unemployed for a long period of time. So we still need to see a rapid retraining of a lot of individuals in the economy. And at the same time, with a lot of businesses accessing support, it's very likely that some insolvencies may pick up for a number of organizations and there may be a slight scarring effect on the economy. All of this means that the budget next week is going to be a crucial moment to try and avoid long term damage. It's likely that the UK will be able to bounce back from around the second and third quarter this year when more and more of the economy reopens... So it's likely that around some point midpoint in 2022 the economy should be very much the size it was before the pandemic began. 

And finally, Lloyds Banking Group is following HSBC's announcement earlier this week, saying it plans a radical review of its property portfolio. It thinks fewer plush offices can help cut costs in the new era of flexible, home working, and plans to offload a fifth of its office space by 2024. But the figures from London show demand for both retail and management property in the banking sector were falling even before the advent of COVID-19.