Ryanair Announces €170m Profit in First Quarter
On Monday of this week, Ryanair announced its financial results for the First Quarter of the year showing a profit after tax of €170 million. While the profit was a huge increase on the €273 million loss a year previously, it was still below the pre-Covid profit of €243 million posted in the first quarter of 2019. Passenger numbers have recovered to 45.5 million, up from 8.1 million in 2021 and 9% ahead of the pre-Covid passenger numbers.
Commenting on the results, Ryanair Group CEO, Michael O’Leary said, “Ryanair puts sustainability at the heart of our growth. This summer we are operating 73 new Boeing 737 “Gamechanger” aircraft, delivering 4% more seats yet burning 16% less fuel and cutting noise emissions by up to 40%. Passengers flying across Europe who switch to Ryanair (from high-fare legacy airlines) can reduce their environmental footprint by up to 50% per flight, proving that with Ryanair, growth can be coupled with more sustainability, leading to a better future for all our guests and their families. We continue to work hard to accelerate the production of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). We are investing in our partnership with Trinity College Dublin’s Sustainable Aviation Research Centre, and in April we announced a partnership with Neste to power up to one third of all our flights from Schiphol Airport (AMS) with a 40% SAF blend. Ryanair hopes to power 12.5% of our flights using SAF and cut our CO₂ per pax/km by 10% to 60 grams by 2030. We are working with A4E, and the EU, to accelerate the reform of the Single European Sky to improve ATC efficiency and reduce flight delays, which will substantially reduce fuel consumption, CO₂ emissions and flight delays. In April, Sustainalytics ranked Ryanair the No.1 airline in Europe (No.2 globally) for ESG performance. Building on this achievement, in June we submitted Ryanair’s commitment letter to SBTi and will work with them over the next 2 years to verify our ambitious targets. Today, we launch our updated (2022) “Aviation with Purpose” sustainability report highlighting ambitious environmental and social targets over the coming years and mapping out Ryanair’s path to net carbon zero by 2050.
In commenting on the outlook ahead, Michael O’Leary went on to say, “While we remain hopeful that the high rate of vaccinations in Europe will allow the airline and tourism industry to fully recover and finally put Covid behind us, we cannot ignore the risk of new Covid variants in Autumn 2022. Our experience with Omicron last November, and the Ukraine invasion in February, shows how fragile the air travel market remains, and the strength of any recovery will be hugely dependent upon there being no adverse or unexpected developments over the remainder of FY23(Fiscal-year 2023). While there are clear signs of pent-up demand, bookings remain closer in than was the norm (pre-Covid) at this time of year. We have limited visibility into the second half of Q2 and almost zero visibility into H2, when we are typically loss making. At this time, Q2 average fares are tracking ahead of peak Summer 2019 (pre-Covid) levels by a low double digit percentage. Ryanair plans to grow FY23 traffic to 165m (+11% on pre-Covid traffic) and will pursue its load active, yield passive strategy to achieve this growth. Despite being one of the best hedged airlines in Europe, high oil prices will lead to increased costs on our 20% unhedged fuel for the remainder of FY23. Given our later booking profile, the lack of visibility, volatile oil prices, potential Covid, geopolitical and supply chain risks, it is too soon to provide meaningful FY23 PAT guidance at this time. We hope to be in a better position to do so at the half-year results in November but, as our experience with Omicron last November and Ukraine in February shows, any guidance is subject to a very rapid change from unexpected events which are well beyond our control during what remains a very strong but still fragile recovery.”
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