Ryanair Holdings (RYAAY) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending December 31, 2022

January 30, 2023 5:00 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Hello, and welcome to the Ryanair Q3 FY '23 Results Conference Call. Throughout the call, all participants will be in listen-only mode. And afterwards, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Just to remind you, this conference call is being recorded.

Today, I am pleased to present Michael O'Leary. Please begin your meeting.

Michael O'Leary

Okay. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. You're all very welcome to the Q3 results conference call. I'm Michael O'Leary with the usual team here in Dublin. And Neil is joining us from London, where he's doing the media stuff this morning. I take the -- I'm not going to deal with the press release. The slide show and the management MD&A is largely dealt with. I'll take those as read and point you to the Investor Relations page on the website.

A couple of quick comments on the Q3 numbers and the kind of outlook going forward. So we reported a very strong Q3, a profit of EUR211 million, which contrasts markedly with the other alleged low fare carriers in Europe, all of whom reported a significant Q3 loss. Our traffic was up 24% to EUR38.4 million, that's up 7% on the pre-COVID figures of FY '20. We're still the only airline that has materially returned to strong growth over our pre-COVID traffic numbers.

We saw a strong rise in Q3 fares, up 14% of the pre-COVID levels. That was mainly due to a very strong October school mid-term and the Christmas and New Year kind of period. We saw very strong traffic at higher than expected airfares. That was why we had went out on the 4th of January with the trading upgrade. And thankfully, for a change, the Christmas trading wasn't disrupted by any adverse news flow on COVID or Ukraine. So we had a reasonably undisturbed but very strong Christmas and New Year period.

We spent a lot of time, I agree with our union partners agreeing the pay restoration. Not alone have we agreed to pay restoration with almost all of our pilots and cabin crews, the only people outstanding are some of the Belgians. But we've also put in place a multiyear pay agreements, we take multiyear pay agreements onto the back of those deals, so that our crews can look forward to kind of guaranteed pay increases over the next four years -- four or five years, depending on which agreements they've done.