A positive start to 2012 for airberlin

May 15, 2012 flight2000it

Germany’s second largest airline can draw positive conclusions from its first quarter of 2012. On presenting airberlin’s interim report, CEO Hartmut Mehdorn announced: “Although it’s too early to celebrate, we can clearly see our “Shape & Size” programme beginning to produce results – we’re starting to step up our efficiency and reap the benefit of lower costs ahead of our competition. And as a result, nearly all the indicators of significance for our business are pointing in the right direction.”

Despite systematically reducing capacity by 10.5%, it has been possible to increase sales figures in the traditionally hardest quarter for the German airline industry by 4% to 812.9 million euros (781.6 million euros) compared with the same quarter of the previous year. Capacity utilisation went up by 3.9 percentage points to 76.4% (72.5%). These are the best results recorded for the first quarter since airberlin was listed on the stock exchange. Yield (income per passenger) rose by 7.3% to 109.8 euros (102.4 euros). EBITDAR (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, Amortisation and Rent) improved by 128% to 7.2 million euros (-25.7 euros), EBIT (Earnings Before Interest and Taxes) went up 20.7% to -149.3 million euros ( 188.3 million euros), and net loss went down by 14.6% to -102.9 million euros (-120.6 million euros).

“Although costs for fuel have gone up to 35.2 million euros and for aviation tax to 4.2 million euros, we’ve managed to improve EBIT by nearly 40 million euros“, announced airberlin CFO Ulf Hüttmeyer. The following conclusions can clearly be drawn from this: Everyone in the company has understood that our efficiency programme is the number one task for management. Despite systematically reducing capacity by more than 10%, passenger numbers have only gone down by 5.8% to 6.5 million. As Hüttmeyer explains: “Our results show that the number of passengers on its own bears almost no relevance to profitability – it’s much more important to ensure that capacity on our aircraft is fully utilised.”

Mehdorn again called for aviation tax to be abolished: “It puts German airlines at an unfair disadvantage in an international arena that is already difficult.“

Source: airberlin