Ryanair Holdings plc (RYAAY) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending June 30, 2023

July 24, 2023 5:00 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Hello. Welcome to the Ryanair Holdings plc Q1 FY'24 Earnings Release Call. My name is Maxine, and I'll be coordinating the call today. [Operator Instructions]

I will now hand over to your host, Michael O'Leary, Group CEO, to begin. Michael, please go ahead when you are ready.

Michael O’Leary

Okay. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. You're welcome to the Q1 results conference call. As usual, this morning, we posted the results release, an extensive MD&A and a video Q&A with myself and Neil Sorahan and that went up on the ryanair.com website at 7 O' Clock this morning. So I refer you to that, and I'll take it as read.

I'll give you a couple of comments on the results and a few thoughts and then we'll open it up -- I'll ask Neil just to give his couple of comments on the MD&A and then we'll open it up for Q&A.

So you've seen this morning, we reported a Q1 profit of EUR663 million. The number is materially distorted because of -- it's compared to Ukraine affected prior year Q1 PAT of EUR170 million last year.

Last year, you'll all recollect Russia invaded Ukraine on the 24th of February, it caused a significant collapse in traffic through March and into Easter. And it also meant if you recollect, we aggressively dumped prices in the Q1 of last year. Prices we reported this time last year, average fares this time last year were down 4% on pre-COVID, as we were aggressively kind of trying to restore load factors through Q1 so that we could kind of underpin Q2.

And I think that's important, and it's something I want to stress a couple of times today. So we had a very -- we very aggressively dumped prices in Q1 last year. And so the kind of the growth of EUR170 million to EUR663 million is a function of the very weak prior year comps. This year's Q1 was helped by a very strong Easter, strong demand, good pricing. We had a second UK bank holiday in May, so we were the beneficiary of that.

So over the quarter one, traffic rose 11% to 50 million passengers. Revenue per passenger was up 27%, as again, that kind of average fares were up 42%, but that's distorted by the fact that average fares were down 4% in the prior year Q1. Ancillary revenues were up 4% on a per passenger basis.