2024-01-25 13:57:02 ET
Wizz Air Holdings PLC (WZZAF)
Q3 2024 Results Conference Call
January 25, 2024 04:00 AM ET
Company Participants
József Váradi - CEO & Executive Director
Ian Malin - EVP & Group CFO
Michael Delehant - EVP & Group COO
Robert Carey - President
Conference Call Participants
Harry Gowers - JPMorgan
James Hollins - BNP Paribas
Jaime Rowbotham - Deutsche Bank
Alex Irving - Bernstein
Andrew Lobbenberg - Barclays
Sathish Sivakumar - Citi
Jarrod Castle - UBS
Presentation
Operator
Good morning and welcome to the Wizz Air Q3 Full Year 2024 Results [Technical Difficulty]. After the presentation, there will be a Q&A session with questions from the room first followed by those online. Now, I hand over.
József Váradi
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for coming. Next slide. So we are reporting Q3 fiscal '24. So this is the period ended on the 31st of December. As you know, the whole financial year fiscal '24 is a tricky one with regard to all the professions to the business arising from geopolitical angles or supply chain angles. And the way whole accounting flows you may come across with some distortion. And I will try to make some commentaries not only on the quarter, but also on what you should be expecting for the whole financial year performance. Because I think you really have to take a financial year perspective as opposed to just a quarterly perspective, given how the accounting works.
So first of all, we continue to grow our business. Capacity grew substantially in the period. Again, just putting things in perspective, Wizz Air today is 50% larger than pre-COVID, making us unique versus the industry. So clearly, we took strategic benefits coming out of the COVID times.
Load factors are somewhat below to our loans, but that's largely the impact of the events we had to react to during the period, and this is the war in Israel and around. With regard to RASK, same issue. So when you look at it from a quarterly perspective, the events around us made a considerable impact on our performance. But I would say that most importantly, we are in a cost business, not in the revenue business. Of course, revenue is important, but we are fundamentally driven by cost.
ULCC as we call ourselves, is operated in a commodity market, short-haul flying is increasingly a commodity. And we believe strategically lowest cost means, lowest cost prevails in order to be successful with that model. So cost is in focus of the company. We started seeing some decline of ex-fuel cost. And of course, we benefited from the lower fuel cost in the marketplace.
Now if you start looking at the underpinning factors affecting your cost performance, you see that the quality of operations has improved tremendously versus where we were a year ago or before. I mean, we are running a different time line. We are one of the best in Europe in terms of flight schedule completion, but also on-time performance has been picking up considerably. Probably the most important underpinning factors is fleet utilization. I mean, this is the way you spread high fixed cost in the system and you drive economic efficiencies....
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Wizz Air Holdings PLC (WZZAF) Q3 2024 Earnings Call Transcript