Swiss posts record result in first nine months
Published: Thursday, Nov 2nd 2023, 08:10
Updated At: Friday, Nov 3rd 2023, 00:54
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Swiss continued its climb in the third quarter of the year. The airline benefited from higher ticket prices and a lower cost base. This gave it the strongest nine-month operating result in the company's history.
The Lufthansa subsidiary flew in an operating profit of 277.6 million francs in the three summer months, up from 220.5 million a year earlier. From July to September, the airline increased its revenue by almost 11 percent to 1.5 billion Swiss francs, it announced on Thursday.
The company was able to operate 99 percent of its flights in the most travel-intensive quarter, which includes the summer vacations. Swiss emphasized that this was despite strikes, difficult weather conditions and staff shortages at partner companies.
Lower costs
Calculated over the entire nine-month period, Swiss revenue was 4.0 billion Swiss francs, according to the communiqué. This means that Swiss's revenue was roughly the same as in the year before the pandemic.
Operating profit even climbed massively to 615.9 million Swiss francs. In the previous year, Swiss had achieved a surplus of 287.5 million, which was less than half as high, and before the pandemic, a surplus of 490 million.
According to Swiss, this is the strongest operating result in the company's history. "We benefited from our competitive cost structures as a result of the restructuring related to the Corona pandemic," Chief Financial Officer Markus Binkert was quoted as saying in the communiqué. The airline's administrative costs currently remain below pre-pandemic levels.
With the onset of the pandemic in 2020, sales had collapsed from one day to the next and the company was posting losses quarter after quarter. As a result, the company was forced to take tough cost-cutting measures, but these have now more than paid off in the current result.
High revenue per ticket
The company also benefited from higher ticket prices, as a look at the figures for the German parent company Lufthansa also shows. Its average revenue per ticket in the third quarter was higher than ever before. Only around the time of the Air Berlin bankruptcy in the third quarter of 2017 did Lufthansa earn more in its day-to-day business.
The Frankfurt-based parent company posted an operating profit of nearly 1.5 billion euros (circa Fr. 1.44 billion) in the July-September period. That is almost a third more than a year earlier, Lufthansa also announced on Thursday.
Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr now sees his Group on track to achieve an operating profit of at least 2.6 billion euros this year, as planned. And the subsidiary Swiss is also optimistic about the rest of the year. Here, they say they expect "a very good result.
Industry facing "normalization
In the medium term, however, it will then become "more challenging" again, according to Swiss. The industry is also currently facing challenges. Energy costs, for example, are rising, while average yields are on the verge of "normalization.
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