DLAKF - Deutsche Lufthansa AG (DLAKF) Q1 2025 Earnings Call Transcript
2025-04-29 15:34:09 ET
Deutsche Lufthansa AG (DLAKF)
Q1 2025 Results Conference Call
April 29, 2025 05:30 AM ET
Company Participants
Marc-Dominic Nettesheim - Head of Investor Relations
Carsten Spohr - Chief Executive Officer
Till Streichert - Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Jaime Rowbotham - Deutsche Bank
James Hollins - BNP Paribas
Ruxandra Haradau-Doser - HSBC
Stephen Furlong - Davy
Jarrod Castle - UBS
Harry Gowers - JPMorgan
Antonio Duarte - Goodbody
Conor Dwyer - Morgan Stanley
Jaina Mistry - Jefferies
Andrew Lobbenberg - Barclays
Alex Irving - Bernstein
Presentation
Marc-Dominic Nettesheim
A very warm welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the presentation of our first quarter results 2025 on this sunny Tuesday here in Frankfurt. With me are today, our CEO, Carsten Spohr; and our CFO, Till Streichert, they will present both our results for the last quarter, discuss our commercial outlook for the remaining 9 months of this year. And afterwards, you will have the opportunity to ask questions. And like always, I want to ask you to limit yourselves to 2 questions per person, so that everybody has a chance to participate in the Q&A session.
Thanks a lot in advance. And with that, Carsten, I hand over to you.
Carsten Spohr
Yes. Thank you, Marc, and a warm welcome from my side as well to our analyst conference, obviously, reporting our first quarter results, which, as you all know, in our industry, are the weakest of the year. However, for this year, I think we have started quite strongly with record sales for the first time going above EUR 8 billion with a 10% growth in the first quarter. But what truly matters for us more than the volatility of the year is the significant progress we are making on our key strategic initiatives, which, in the end, position us for the future. And there without doubt, the turnaround of our core brand, Lufthansa, remains our highest priority. We are fully committed to reestablish Lufthansa Airlines as the proud flagship of our group, and we are really moving in that direction.
At the heart of this transformation is and remains operational excellence. Knowing that in our industry, strong operational performance is the key to also sustainable financial success. And with the Easter wave now successfully behind us, manage smoothly and efficiently our confidence heading into the summer season continues to build. While underscoring our determination to deliver best-in-class performance, we successfully invested in recruiting, training and qualifying additional operational staff even further expanding our reserve capabilities on the fleet side, and maybe that's most important, further intensifying our cooperation and coordination with our system partners at the airports, mainly and also at least we're trying to do the same with air traffic control.
These efforts are delivering results. Lufthansa Airlines operational performance, which we measure in regularity and punctuality, is now not only stable, but on the highest levels of the last 10 years. And at the same time, obviously, as we have stabilized operations, we are witnessing less and less stable or more volatile global political environments. And as always in turbulent times, the question is how will these developments impact our industry? And for us, at the Lufthansa Group at least, our structural setup and the various strategic initiatives of the last years have significantly enhanced our resilience, providing us with valuable buffers when it comes to the volatility of the current environment.
And there are indeed several good news. In the first quarter, we continue to benefit from robust sustained demand. Our airlines increased capacity by 5% compared to the same quarter last year, and we successfully translated that growth into higher yields, while even increasing our load factors as well. And that momentum has carried into the second quarter. Pre-booking levels across all traffic regions are at least in line and in some cases, above last year's already strong figures. And as a result, we expect the positive trend to continue at least throughout the first half of the year.
That said, we're beginning to see early signs of some softness in the third quarter, though. Bookings have slightly softened in the U.S. destinations to and from. However, mainly in the lower fare classes. But however, we have often observed in the past that customers booking windows become shorter in volatile times. So I think we will see some of these bookings probably surfacing over the next weeks rather than disappearing for good....
Deutsche Lufthansa AG (DLAKF) Q1 2025 Earnings Call Transcript