Passengers wait to board an aircraft of low cost Irish airline Ryanair at the Berlin-Brandenburg airport in Schoenefeld near Berlin, Germany, on March 13, 2024.
John Macdougall | Afp | Getty Images
Budget airline Ryanair on Monday reported stronger-than-expected after-tax profit for the December quarter, but once more cut its passenger traffic goal for the fiscal year to the end of March 2026 amid Boeing delivery delays.
Europe’s largest low-cost carrier posted after-tax profit of 149 million euros ($155.8 million) for the fiscal third quarter to the end of December, coming in comfortably above expectations. A company poll of analysts had anticipated 60 million euros profit for the three-month period, Reuters reported.
Ryanair cited marginally higher fares due to stronger Christmas and New Year bookings, noting traffic grew 9% to 45 million passengers despite “prolonged” Boeing delays.
The low-cost airline said that, while Boeing’s 737 production is recovering from a strike at the firm in late 2024, Ryanair no longer expected the troubled U.S. planemaker to deliver sufficient aircraft to facilitate full-year traffic growth to 210 million passengers across the twelve months to the end of March 2026. It downgraded this figure to 206 million.
An earlier growth target of 215 million passengers over the same period was trimmed in November.
“I’d be optimistic into next year. Bookings are very strong into the summer, although it is just too early to call where they may go,” Ryanair CFO Neil Sorahan told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Monday.
“Disappointed that we’re not going to hit the traffic numbers that we would have hoped,” he added.
Cautious guidance
Sorahan, who said he recently returned from a trip to Boeing’s production facilities into Seattle, said he’d seen “huge improvements in relation to supply chain and everything else” in recent months.
“I have a high level of confidence that the remaining nine aircraft that we need to get to 181 ‘Gamechangers’ along with the existing fleet will come in,” he added.
Sorahan said that Boeing appeared to have “turned the corner,” adding that he was hopeful Ryanair would not need to cut its traffic targets even further.
Analysts at Citi said Ryanair’s full-year capacity guidance is likely to “create volatility” in the firm’s share price, “but given it is an industry-wide issue, we think that it can be supportive for the pricing environment.”
Ryanair said it was “cautiously guiding” after-tax profit for the 12 months through to March 31 in a range of 1.55 billion euros to 1.61 billion euros, noting the outcome remains subject to the risk of conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East and to further Boeing delivery delays.