Ryanair CFO on Q1 results: “traffic has rebounded quite strongly”

Ryanair Holdings plc (LON: RYA) reported a wider than expected net loss for the fiscal first quarter on Monday. The budget airline said signs of improvement were evident in Q1, but there was still a lot of room to cover before it returns to pre-pandemic levels. According to CFO Neil Sorahan:

“Traffic has rebounded quite strongly. People are getting confidence; they’re starting to come back. We’re probably a couple of months behind our colleagues in the U.S., where domestic operation seems to be back to almost pre-pandemic levels. Europe’s a little bit behind that, but we’d be hopeful that we will see a bounce back over the course of this year.”

Ryanair’s Q1 financial performance

Ryanair reported £233 million of net loss for the quarter that concluded on 30^th June versus the year-ago figure of £158.23 million in loss. This compares to the FactSet consensus of £131.73 million of loss.

The Irish air carrier generated £316.72 million of revenue in the recent quarter – an increase from 107.03 million last year. According to FactSet, experts had forecast a higher £335.62 million in revenue.

Ryanair expects to fly up to 100 million passengers this year, which means it will either break even this year or face a small loss only. It flew over 5 million passengers in June and expects the number to jump to 9 million this month and more than 10 million in August.

The rising risk of the new delta variant, as per Ryanair, is keeping the COVID-related uncertainty in place that continues to hurt its financial performance in 2022. While summer bookings were strong, fares, it added, were still below pre-Coronavirus levels.

CFO Neil Sorahan’s comments on CNBC’s “Squawk Box”

Commenting on the financial update on Monday, CFO Sorahan said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box”:

“In traffic terms, we were at 149 million coming into COVID, we’d hope to get that back to about 150 million next year, and then we start growing towards 200 million over the next four years. That will be driven along by the new game-changer; the new Boeing aircraft will be taken into the fleet. We have 210 of those on order, of which nearly ten have delivered already this point in time and proven to be phenomenal aircraft.”

Ryanair shares are about 4% up on Monday.