RYAAY - Ryanair Holdings plc (RYAAY) Q3 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
2024-01-29 12:21:02 ET
Ryanair Holdings plc (RYAAY)
Q3 2024 Earnings Conference Call
January 29, 2024 05:00 ET
Company Participants
Michael O’Leary - Chief Executive Officer
Neil Sorahan - Chief Financial Officer
Eddie Wilson - Chief Executive Officer, Ryanair DAC
Juliusz Komorek - Group Chief Legal and Regulatory Officer
Thomas Fowler - Director, Sustainability and Finance
Tracey McCann - Chief Financial Officer, Ryanair DAC
Conference Call Participants
Harry Gowers - JPMorgan
Stephen Furlong - Davy
Dudley Shanley - Goodbody
Jaime Rowbotham - Deutsche Bank
Sathish Sivakumar - Citi
Alex Irving - Bernstein
James Hollins - BNP Paribas
Savanthi Syth - Raymond James
Duane Pfennigwerth - Evercore ISI
Ruairi Cullinane - RBC
Gerald Khoo - Liberum
Conor Dwyer - Morgan Stanley
Muneeba Kayani - Bank of America
Alex Paterson - Peel Hunt
Neil Glynn - AIR Control Tower
Presentation
Michael O’Leary
Okay. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. You’re all very welcome to the Q3 results call. As you see earlier this morning on our ryanair.com website, we published our Q3 results together with an MD&A and a Q&A section with myself and CFO, Neil Sorahan.
A couple of quick themes. As you see, we reported a Q3 profit after tax of €15 million. Traffic and fares were ahead of the prior year, but closing Christmas and New Year loads and yields were softer than previously expected, as we had to lower prices somewhat in response to the very sudden, but surprising but very welcome removal of flights from most of the major OTA pirate websites in early December. Profit after tax, however, for the 9 months ended 31 December was up 39% at €2.19 billion. Prior year, it was €1.58 billion.
Just to touch on some brief Q3 highlights. The traffic grew 7% to 41 million. Revenue per passenger was up 9%. Average fares were up 13%, mainly due to a very strong Christmas and the October bank holiday weekend and ancillary revenues up 2%. MSCI raised their ESG rating on Ryanair from a BBB to an A in December. Our fuel bill rose €320 million in the quarter, up 35% to €1.2 billion. At the quarter end, we had 136 B737 Gamechangers in the total fleet that was significantly behind the original deliveries due to Boeing delays. More importantly, going forward, our fuel hedging, we’ve extended fuel hedging. We have 65% of our FY ‘25 fuel now hedged at $79 per barrel. This year, we are hedged at $89 per barrel. So we have already banked a saving of €450 million into FY ‘25. And as you will all be aware, we have ended the first interim dividend of €0.175 per share is payable on the February 28.
I think just to touch on growth in fleet. At the end of Q3, we’ve taken delivery of 136 737 Gamechangers. We now expect to have up to 174 of these aircraft in our fleet by the end of June in time for peak summer 2024, that’s up 50 aircraft from summer 2023. That would still be 7 aircraft short of our contracted deliveries due to Boeing delivery delays. However, those new aircraft means we have a bumper summer 2024 schedule now on sale. It includes 169 new routes, our first 11 domestic routes in Morocco and our first summer with 23 routes in Albania, are in to and from Tirana, the capital city of Albania.
While travel demand remains high, we expect summer ‘24 EU short-haul capacity to be behind where it was in summer ‘23 as a considerable number of our competitors ground the A320 aircraft in Europe due to the Pratt & Whitney engine issues and Boeing delivery delays constrain our growth from 57 to 50 aircraft. We are continuing to work closely with Boeing to minimize delivery delays and we have invested in additional engineering over – Ryanair engineering oversight to improve the quality control in both Wichita and Seattle....
Ryanair Holdings plc (RYAAY) Q3 2024 Earnings Call Transcript