Alaska Air Group (ALK) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending March 31, 2023

April 20, 2023 11:30 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Alaska Air Group 2023 First Quarter Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] Today's call is being recorded and will be accessible for future playback at alaskaair.com. After our speakers' remarks, we will conduct a question-and-answer session for analysts.

I would now like to turn the call over to Alaska Air Group's Vice President of Finance, Planning and Investor Relations, Ryan St. John.

Ryan St. John

Thank you, operator, and good morning. Thank you for joining us first quarter 2023 Earnings Call. This morning, we issued our earnings release, which is available at investor.alaskaair.com. Today, you'll hear updates from Ben, Andrew and Shane. Several others of our management team are also on the line to answer your questions during the Q&A portion of the call.

This morning, Air Group reported a first quarter GAAP net loss of $142 million. Excluding special items and mark-to-market fuel hedge adjustments, Air Group reported an adjusted net loss of $79 million. As a reminder, our comments today will include forward-looking statements about future performance, which may differ materially from our actual results. Information on risk factors that could affect our business can be found within our SEC filings.

We will also refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures such as adjusted earnings and unit costs, excluding fuel. And as usual, we have provided a reconciliation between the most directly comparable GAAP and non-GAAP measures in today's earnings release. Over to you, Ben.

Benito Minicucci

Hello, and good morning, everyone. Before I begin, I want to welcome Ryan St. John as our new Head of Investor Relations. Ryan is a 15-year veteran of Alaska and also leads our financial and resource planning groups. I'm excited to see Ryan step into this role and know he will do a great job in it. I also must acknowledge Emily Halverson, who Ryan is replacing. Emily stepped into the IR role at the onset of the pandemic, not the easiest time to learn how to do this important and challenging work. Emily has been fantastic as our Head of IR, but this change will allow her to fully focus on leading our accounting and financial reporting functions as our controller.

So now turning to our results. Despite our first quarter loss, I am pleased to report that our operational and financial performance trended positively as we progressed throughout the quarter. We are actively driving improvements in our business, and I believe we are well positioned to capitalize in the second and third quarters. It's important to note that Alaska, along with the entire industry, historically experienced weaker results in the first quarter, and our loss is primarily a reflection of our current network seasonality.