Wizz Air Holdings Plc

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. And welcome to WITS-A fiscal year 2022 results call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. And after the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question, you need to press star and 1 on your telephone. We would like to receive just two questions per person per day. I would now like to end the conference over to the Wits Age CEO, Joseph Varady. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for coming. Thanks for joining. So this is to report the last financial year as we titled it Fiscal 22. So last year we had a very strong recovery, especially relative to Fiscal 21, 166% more passengers, carried by the airline. Obviously, we have largely extended our geographical footprint during this period by investing into our network. The results we are communicating today are pretty much in line with previous communications, so I don't think we are bringing any surprise to the party here. So we suffered 642 million euros of loss as previously guided. Obviously, this is the cost of ramping up the business under the circumstances that we ended up the financial year with strong liquidity, 1.4 billion euros, and we continue to be graded by Fitch and Moody's investment grade credit We have been investing into our fleet, our markets, as well as our people. So the fleet grew to 153 aircraft. Just for your perspective, since the breakout of the pandemic, we have been taking 45 brand new aircraft deliveries. And also, the organization has grown. We reached over 6,000 employees at the end of the financial year. At the peak, prior to the pandemic, we were at around 5,000 employees. We are seeing very strong summer demand emerging, and we are also seeing the airline to return to historical utilization and productivity levels as well as exterior cost performance. We are operating at significantly higher capacity as we speak versus 2019. We are up 30% in the first quarter of the current financial year, and we are expecting around 40% higher capacity in the summer quarter. So if you just look at the footprint of the airline, we have been growing across the board. As I said, 27 million passengers, nearly tripling down on passenger count relative to the previous financial year. The fleet kept growing, 153 aircraft, airports. I mean, we have been investing into a number of new markets, new countries, new airports, pursuing opportunities arising from the COVID situation. So a number of bases have been actually consolidated to some extent. You recall that when COVID broke out, We reallocated capacity to make sure that we keep the airline operation as much as possible. Some of it was strategic, some of it was more opportunistic, and now I think we have a more concentrated operation than before. Nonetheless, it is a largely extended geographical footprint. We have been much pursuing our sustainability targets as well. very aware of the need to deliver the L9 greener than before, and I think we have been leading the sustainability development of the industry with that regard, and we got recognized for that by various parties. It is important to note that if you look at the fleet footprint of Bizet, and I will elaborate on that later, We have a younger fleet of aircraft, a more efficient fleet of aircraft that is economically a better performing fleet than the fleet of the rest of the industry. And also environmentally, it is a more favorable footprint and a lower carbon emission level than the rest of the industry. And the fleet, we believe, remains a key source of competitive advantage for Bizel going forward. And with that highlight, let me just turn it over to Eric.

Thank you, Joseph. Good morning, everyone. On the next slide, page four, basically just closing on the F22 results. So Joseph was mentioning the increase in passenger traffic. You can see equally revenue doubled versus obviously the first year of COVID. You can see from an EBITDA profile, we've significantly reduced the loss, almost reaching a break-even EBITDA in the second year of COVID. But unfortunately, obviously, it still led to a significant reported loss. A big swing factor in the reported loss was the unrealized FX losses as the dollar strengthened. That's a swing of around $120 million, and it was a positive inflow in F21 of around $30 million and a negative of around $90 million in F22. So that does stain kind of the reported numbers, and you should always take that into account on our business, given the exposure to US dollar liabilities. Moving on to what's really crucial for the business, which is CASQ and XU-CASQ. You can see that, yes, XU-CASQ did improve versus F21 clearly to 2.81, but clearly it's still far off from where we want to be. We used to be at 2.27 areas. And as Joseph says, we want to go back there very soon. If you look at what really, really impacted the numbers, it's all of the fixed cost lines. I mean, utilization was at seven hours, 44 minutes. It's well below our 12 and a half hours, which we want to do for this year. And that impacts the lines like staff costs, it impacts your maintenance costs, it impacts your depreciation costs, and even to some extent your airport and handling costs. So there's nothing structurally wrong with the business, but we need to be able to operate it at full utilization, which is our prime focus. From a liquidity point of view, I mean, we keep maintaining very strong liquidity, around 1.4 billion. There's been a number of changes, as you know, in terms of how we funded the business. We raised half a billion. At 1% in January, we repaid the CCFF fund. We maintain a very strong balance sheet, the investment grade rating, with Fitch & Moody's for the company. If you look at the internals on the liquidity on page 7, you can clearly see what I mentioned just now on the bonds inflow and the repayment of the CCFF. We had a material investment in fleet, as Joseph mentioned. We took delivery of 45 aircrafts. But during the year, we also announced the supplemental order on fleet, which is obviously critical to continue to support our growth, our momentum into with 500. As we see the opportunities around our network in front of us. And then obviously, as we all know, the operation has been, if you include the lease cost, a big drain for the company during the second COVID year as well. working capital has started to flow in. Obviously, the unflown revenue during the year has improved versus March 2021 as the activity levels have started to increase, and there's obviously more to come where this came from. Last slide for me on ancillary. If you look at the ancillary progression here, very strong progression during F22, so in total up 3 euro per passenger over that time horizon. We continue to see that, and we'll talk about that a little bit when we talk maybe Q&A or further guidance, but the ancillary continues to be very strong we believe you can maintain or stretch target of one euro per passenger per year increase that's what we see in India first month also of the of the new fiscal year you know the drivers they haven't changed dynamic pricing the product portfolio that we're offering some of that dynamic pricing by the way we're now applying also on ticket fair so we can talk that a little bit later but clearly a very strong and fluidly revenue performance and that continues And with that, I hand it back to Joe.