Ryanair Holdings (RYAAY) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending March 31, 2023

May 22, 2023 5:00 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Welcome to the Ryanair FY '23 Earnings 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 of Ryanair Holdings plc to begin. Michael, please go ahead when you're ready.

Michael O'Leary

Okay. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Ryanair full year results investor call. We have extensive numbers of teams all dialing in because we have an extensive - today and I think 12 teams on the road show this week. So anybody looking for a meeting, please call any of our brokers out of Davy, Citi or at Goodbody.

I take the results as read. We have an extensive presentation, Q&A on the ryanair.com website. Go there. While you're there, buy - make some bookings. You'll need them this summer as prices are rising.

To touch briefly on the last 12, we've sort of seen a very strong recovery. Traffic grew to 168.6 million passenger, which is up 13% in our pre-COVID capacity in a marketplace in Europe, which was operating last year at less than 90% pre-COVID capacity. So Ryanair has been taking enormous sways of market share in almost all markets across Europe.

While our traffic has recovered last year ahead of COVID, profits are still marginally behind where they were pre-COVID at 100 – at €1.4 billion. Nevertheless, a very strong performance at a time when most of our certainly, the local competitors in Europe are losing - are still reporting losses for the last year. Underpinning that was a very strong fuel hedge performance last year, and that poses a challenge for it going forward over the next 12 months.

Looking out a couple of broad themes which I'd like to explore, I think during the Q&A, in particular. We're looking out into a year where we have embedded an enormous cost advantage over almost every other airline in Europe.

I think one of the very significant results of COVID has been two things. One, a huge amount of capacity has been weeded out of Europe. You've seen a huge number of airlines with quite a considerable capacity go above the Tomago, VEs, German Wings [ph] The other incumbents that survive that COVID have either, a, structurally reduce their capacity. Alitalia is operating at 60% pre-COVID capacity, TAP, about 3% pre-COVID capacity. Lufthansa, for example, this year in the German market is still only operating at 80% of its pre-COVID capacity in the short-haul market, and yet prices have doubled. So there is heavily constrained capacity.