Significantly higher ticket prices brought Europe’s largest low-cost airline Ryanair a profit in the Christmas quarter. Management believes that this trend should continue. “We will achieve record profits in the current fiscal year and expect to continue to grow profitably next year and beyond,” Chief Financial Officer Neil Sorahan told Bloomberg news agency when the quarterly figures were presented in Dublin on Monday. According to his estimates, the rise in ticket prices should continue around Easter and in the summer.
On the Dublin stock exchange, however, the news was acknowledged with slight price losses. Most recently, the airline’s shares were down around 0.2 percent.
Ryanair had already announced the quarterly profit of around 200 million euros at the beginning of January and raised the profit forecast for the current financial year until the end of March. Since then, the group management around Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary has been counting on an annual profit adjusted for special effects of 1.325 to 1.425 billion euros.
Easyjet is in the red
In the third business quarter up to the end of December, profits of a good 202 million euros were almost exactly as announced. On average, analysts had expected a little more. In the second Corona winter a year earlier, Ryanair was still in the red with 96 million euros.
The British competitor Easyjet, on the other hand, was still in the red in the past quarter, but also expects a profit before taxes for its entire financial year up to the end of September 2023. The corona pandemic had hit the aviation industry hard. Many airlines only survived the crisis thanks to state aid and had to get fresh money from shareholders. In 2022, however, air traffic in large parts of the world recovered significantly from the crisis.
Ryanair carried around 38.4 million passengers in the past quarter, 24 percent more than a year earlier. Sales jumped 57 percent to 2.3 billion euros. This was mainly due to the high ticket prices: According to the information, flight tickets were 48 percent more expensive on average than in the same period last year and thus cost 14 percent more than before the corona pandemic.
