UAL - United Airlines Holdings Inc. (UAL) 2024 Citi's Global Industrial Tech & Mobility Conference (Transcript)
2024-02-20 15:39:02 ET
United Airlines Holdings, Inc. (UAL)
2024 Citi’s Global Industrial Tech & Mobility Conference Call
February 20, 2024 11:20 ET
Company Participants
Mike Leskinen - Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Stephen Trent - Citi
Presentation
Stephen Trent
Good morning, everybody and thank you very much for attending Citi's Industrials Conference. I'm Steve Trent, the Americas Airlines and Latin Transport Analyst. And we are absolutely delighted to have United Airlines with us this morning, CFO, Mike Leskinen. Really great to have you. And before we start just kind of 2 minor housekeeping things, if anyone does need my legal disclosures, they are available upon request, I can e-mail them off to you. And we would encourage our audience participation. So you folks have questions, you are more important than me, please -- please ask away.
But in the meantime, Mike, thanks so much for coming and really great to have you here. If I could kick off your position in the new CFO seat, What's your number one priority when you think about your new role and maybe what things have surprised you about being in the seat.
Mike Leskinen
Well, Steve, thank you very much for being here. And I'm so excited to be in this new seat. United Airlines, depending on how you measure it, already the largest airline in the world, we are in the very early innings of a transformation of this industry that is going to create structurally higher, more -- less cyclical earnings. And I think we'll ultimately lead to strong free cash flow profile for United and some of the major carriers. And what's special to be CFO at that time is right now, none of you believe that with my stock trade at 4x. So I only have upside.
What has been a surprise for me in the CFO seat? Look, I made the transition to corporate America 6 years ago and I've had 6 years to learn a lot about United before taking the seat. I think that it is fair to say that this is an industry that folks joined because aircraft are sexy, people like buying airplanes. And I like buying airplanes, too. But we need to balance the airplanes we build -- we purchase with the returns that we generate as we share with other stakeholders like creditors and shareholders. And so as I think about -- what I intend to influenced early is balance, the balance between FX and other uses of cash we generate....
United Airlines Holdings, Inc. (UAL) 2024 Citi's Global Industrial Tech & Mobility Conference (Transcript)