Korona og Ryanair - Aviation24.be

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Ryanair reports Q3 loss of €306 million as traffic falls 78%

By

 André Orban

 -

2 February 2021

0

92

COVID-19

Covid-19 continues to wreak havoc across the industry.  Christmas & New Year traffic was severely impacted by UK travel bans imposed at short notice by many EU Govts on 19 & 20 Dec.  These flight bans, and travel restrictions, saw the Group’s Dec. traffic fall by 83% to just 1.9m passengers.  As announced on 7 Jan., Ryanair expects the latest lockdowns and pre-arrival Covid test requirement to materially reduce flight schedules and traffic through to Easter.  The Group’s full-year (FY21) traffic forecast was therefore reduced to “between 26m to 30m” passengers.

The Covid pandemic has caused the closure of EU airlines including Flybe, Germanwings, Level and Montenegro Airlines.  Norwegian has already entered a creditor protection examinership and Eurocontrol predicts more EU airline failures in 2021.  Significant capacity reductions have been implemented by many EU airlines and a flood of unlawful State Aid has been committed by EU Govts to their flag carriers including Alitalia, Air France/KLM, LOT, Lufthansa, SAS, TAP and others.  This illegal State Aid distorts competition and the level playing field across EU aviation.  We expect intra-European capacity to be significantly reduced for the next few years, which will create growth opportunities for Ryanair (Europe’s lowest cost airline) to take advantage of recovery growth incentives, as it takes delivery of 210 new (lower cost) Boeing 737s.  As soon as the Covid-19 virus recedes – and it will over the coming months as EU Govts accelerate vaccine rollouts – Ryanair and its partner airports will rapidly restore schedules, recover lost traffic, help the nations of Europe to reboot their tourism industry, and create jobs for young people across the cities and beaches of the EU.  We take some comfort from the success of the UK vaccine programme which is on target to vaccinate almost 50% of the UK population (30m) by the end of March.  The EU now needs to step up the slow pace of its rollout programme to match the UK’s performance.