The easing of health restrictions is benefiting the Irish low-cost airline, which has just posted its first quarterly profit.
Posted
Reading time : 1 min.
The first benefit since the start of the pandemic for Ryanair. The quarter that closed the summer indeed ended with a profit of 225 million euros. Please note, this positive net result is understood over a single quarter. If we take into account the activity since the beginning of the year, the company remains in the red but it is recovering. Concretely, Ryanair divided its loss by eight over the first six months of the year.
Ryanair is a low-cost company and does not necessarily reflect the state of health of all air traffic. But between April and September, it saw its traffic soar by 130% with 39 million passengers transported against 17 million over the same period last year. This has boosted its turnover by just over 80% to two billion euros. As for the year as a whole, Ryanair’s management does not promise miracles because to find customers, the company had to make efforts on its already very competitive prices compared to its competitors. Low prices to attract customers and therefore increase volumes: Ryanair has reduced its prices by 30%, which automatically weighs on its margins.
Air France-KLM is on the same line. The Franco-Dutch company returned to the green at the end of the summer. Air France-KLM’s pre-tax profit approached 800 million euros in the third quarter compared to a loss of 440 million over the same period last year. Over the coming months, activity will depend on the evolution of the pandemic and the deployment of the Covid vaccine. But a real sign of the optimism displayed despite a still tense situation: Ryanair plans to create 5,000 jobs over the next five years while it has cut 3,000 since the start of the crisis.