Ryanair Holdings plc (NASDAQ:RYAAY) Q2 2025 Results Conference Call November 4, 2024 5:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Michael O’Leary - Group Chief Executive Officer
Neil Sorahan - Group Chief Financial Officer
Edward Wilson - Ryanair DAC Chief Executive Officer
Juliusz Komorek - Group Chief Legal and Regulatory Officer; Company Secretary
Thomas Fowler - Director of Fuel and Sustainability

Conference Call Participants

James Hollins - BNP Paribas
Harry Gowers - JPMorgan
Stephen Furlong - Davy
Muneeba Kayani - Bank of America
Dudley Shanley - Goodbody
Alex Irving - Bernstein
Jarrod Castle - UBS
Sathish Sivakumar - Citi
Savanthi Syth - Raymond James
Duane Pfennigwerth - Evercore ISI
Andrew Lobbenberg - Barclays
Gerald Khoo - Liberum
Conor Dwyer - Morgan Stanley

Operator

Good morning, and welcome to the Ryanair H1 Results Call. My name is Adam, and I'll be your operator for today. [Operator Instructions].

I will now hand over to Ryanair Group CEO, Michael O'Leary, to begin. Please go ahead.

Michael O’Leary

Okay. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Ryanair H1 Results Conference Call. We're joined by all the members of the team from different parts of the globe. And we'll -- I'm going to run through quick highlights. As Neil Sorahan, our group CFO, as usual, to give you a comment on the financial highlights, and then we will maximize the time for Q&A.

So, you'll see this morning, we reported H1 after-tax profits of EUR1.8 billion, 18% lower than the prior year H1 profit of EUR2.18 billion. Highlights at the half year were traffic, strong growth, 9%, to a record of EUR115 million. It would have been higher, but for the repeated Boeing delays. At the key theme, with average fares fell in the half year by 10%, but the trend is improving. We were down 15% in Q1, down 7% in Q2. We'll turn to Q3 on -- when we look at forward guidance.

We have 170x B737 Gamechangers in a 608 aircraft fleet at the end of the half, and that had risen to 172x by the end of October. We have five new bases; 200 new routes opened this summer. The approved OTA partnerships now cover over 90% of all OTAs. These protect consumers from being overcharged by OTAs. We give OTAs direct feed into the ryanair.com website, but in return, they guarantee that the customer will get only to win our prices. We also get the e-mail accurate cost of e-mail and accurate customer credit cards. So, we have a direct relationship with every cost in our booking through approved OTAs.