Ryanair Holdings plc (NASDAQ:RYAAY) Q2 2024 Earnings Call November 6, 2023 5:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Michael O’Leary - Group Chief Executive Officer

Neil Sorahan - Group Chief Financial Officer

Jason McGuinness - Chief Commercial Officer

Thomas Fowler - Director, Sustainability and Finance

Edward Wilson - Chief Executive Officer, Ryanair DAC

Tracey McCann - Chief Financial Officer, Ryanair DAC

Juliusz Komorek - Group Chief Legal & Regulatory Officer and Company Secretary

Conference Call Participants

Jaime Rowbotham - Deutsche Bank

Jarrod Castle - UBS

Alex Patterson - Peel Hunt

Gerald Khoo - Liberum

Conor Dwyer - Morgan Stanley

Stephen Furlong - Davy

Dudley Shanley - Goodbody

James Hollins - ExaneBNP Paribas

Alex Irving - Bernstein

Savanthi Syth - Raymond James

Ruairi Cullinane - RBC Capital Markets

Muneeba Kayani - Bank of America

Sathish Sivakumar - Citi

Duane Pfennigwerth - Evercore ISI

Operator

Hello, and welcome to the Ryanair Holdings plc H1 FY’24 Earnings Call. My name is Maxine and I'll be coordinating the call today. [Operator Instructions] I'll now hand you over to your host, Michael O’Leary, Group CEO, to begin. Michael, please go ahead when you are ready.

Michael O’Leary

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Ryanair half one results analyst call. You have seen this morning on our website, we loaded the half one results, there's a full MD&A, and a Q&A with myself and CFO, Neil Sorahan. But just to focus on some highlight pieces, obviously we've had a very strong Easter and record summer traffic that resulted in a very strong half year profit rising at EUR2.18 billion and we expect over the full year now that a profit after tax of about EUR10 per passenger is likely to be achieved and we've declared our first ordinary dividend, it's not a first dividend, but it's certainly our first ordinary dividend has been declared this morning.

Highlights of the half one traffic grew 11% to EUR105 million. We maintain a very strong 95% load factor through the summer period. Again, I keep coming back to the point, we're operating in a constrained market in Europe, and that is good for traffic. It's good for load factors, and it's certainly been good for average fares.

Revenue per passenger is up 17%, that's a combination of average fares up 24% and ancillary revenues up 3%. We opened three new bases and 194 new routes in summer 2023. We've now, the fleet of Gamechangers is now up to 124 aircraft. The total fleet at the end of September is 563 aircraft. Our fuel bill rose sharply because we were so well-hedged in the prior year. So, in the half year, our fuel bill rose EUR600 million, that's up 29% to EUR2.8 billion. However, we've continued to judiciously extend our fuel hedging program. We remain 85% hedged for FY24 at about $89 per barrel, well below the current spot. And, but we're happy to report that we're now about 53% hedged for FY25 at about $79 per barrel, locking in a saving of about $300 million on the first half of the fuel we need for FY25.