UAL - United Airlines Holdings Inc. (UAL) J.P. Morgan 2024 Industrials Conference
2024-03-12 20:33:02 ET
United Airlines Holdings, Inc. (UAL)
J.P. Morgan 2024 Industrials Conference
March 12, 2024 8:30 AM ET
Company Participants
Scott Kirby - Chief Executive Officer
Michael Leskinen - Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Jamie Baker - J.P. Morgan
Presentation
Jamie Baker
All right, folks, moving right along. This should be an interesting presentation as always. I hate to break it to the audience, but the industry really does have a CASM problem. And the CASM that I'm referring to is that, on one side, you have companies that make money; and on the other side of the CASM, you don't. Thankfully, we have a company that makes money here.
So with that let me turn it over to Scott Kirby, CEO of United Airlines. Scott?
Scott Kirby
All right. Thank you, Jamie. Thank you. All right. Welcome, everyone. So obviously, I'll take a couple of minutes today and then we'll get to Q&A. But I'm going to once again try to start with perhaps a different way of explaining you -- or kind of a big-picture overview of where I think the industry and United within the industry is headed and how it is evolving.
And one way I'll start it is the last four years have been quite a tumultuous time. It was four years ago at this conference where you switched to virtual at the last minute. And I can remember getting on the call and talking about revenue being down 70%, which turned out to be wildly optimistic. But no one else believed that anything like that could happen and being amazed that our stock price went up. And I think Mike told me that happened because you just took the absolute worst case off the table, and I mean I wish you hadn't said that because I think this might be really bad. But it's amazing to be standing here four years ago today. And I started that story because it's really relevant to where I think we are going. And I think this is a structurally different industry in a lot of ways.
And so what I think is important from a structural perspective is there's two things that happened. One, primarily driven by cost convergence, the whole industry has moved to a higher level. The tide has risen. The bar has moved and it's going to continue to move to a higher level, and margin will expand across the whole industry in the years to come. But the other thing that's happening, which creates a lot of angst in the stock market over the near-term is, I'll call it, a seesaw. The margins has flipped. The seesaw has rotated the other way. It used to be the ULCCs were at the highest, then the low-cost carriers and then the network carriers. That's a broad generalization, not exactly everyone fits. But in a broad term, that would have been a seesaw if you just plotted out the margins....
United Airlines Holdings, Inc. (UAL) J.P. Morgan 2024 Industrials Conference