Wizz Air Holdings Plc

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Good morning and welcome to the Wizz Air Q3 for year 2024. After the presentation there will be a Q&A session with questions from the room first followed by those online.

Good morning everyone, thank you for coming. So we are reporting Q3 fiscal 24. So this is the period ended on the 31st of December. As you know, the whole financial year fiscal 24 is a tricky one with regard to all the infections to the business arising from geopolitical angles or supply chain angles and the way how accounting close, you may come across with some distortion. And I will try to make some commentaries, not only on the quarter, but also on what you should be expecting for the whole financial year performance, because I think you really have to take a financial year perspective as opposed to just a quarterly perspective, given how the accounting works. Well, first of all, we continue to grow our business. Capacity grew substantially in the period. Again, just putting things in perspective, Bizair today is 50% larger than pre-COVID, making us unique versus the industry. So clearly, we took strategic benefits coming out of the COVID times. Load factors... are somewhat below to our norms, but that's largely the impact of the events we had to react to during the period. And this is the war in Israel and Iran. With regard to Rusk, same issue. So when you look at it from a quarterly perspective, the events around us made a considerable impact on our performance. But I would say that most importantly, in a cost business, not in a revenue business. Of course, revenue is important, but we are fundamentally driven by cost. USEC, as we call ourselves, is operated in a commodity market. Short-haul flying is increasingly a commodity. And we believe strategically lowest cost wins, lowest cost prevails in order to be successful with that model. So cost is in focus of the company. We started seeing some decline of ex-fuel cost and of course we benefited from the lower fuel cost in the marketplace. Now, if you start looking at the underpinning factors affecting your cost performance, you see that the quality of operations has improved tremendously versus where we were a year ago or before. I mean, we are running a different airline. We are one of the best in Europe in terms of flight schedule completion, but also on-time performance has been picking up considerably. Probably the most important underpinning factor is fleet utilization. I mean, this is the way you spread high fixed cost in the system and you derive economic efficiencies. This is now back to basically pre-COVID levels. And I would like you to kind of think over the financial year here. So we are expecting 12 and a half hours of fleet utilization to come through when you exclude the entry related grounding. So all others are included. So maintenance aircraft, spare aircraft, you name them. other than the engine-related groundings. We are bang on target 12.5 hours what we communicated, and this is in line with pre-COVID performance. And we believe that this is one of the most significant underpinning performance factors to cost performance. As we speak, we have a number of aircraft on the ground due to engine inspections. At the end of the period, we are reporting certain aircraft on the ground. Today, we have 35 aircraft on the ground. on the ground. Nevertheless, I think we continue to be recognized globally for our economic efficiency and corresponding environmental and sustainability efficiency. We got named again by CARPA to be the most sustainable airline on the planet for the second time. And I think we are also well recognized for our safety efforts and safety records being named within the group of the top five safest global low-cost airlines by airline rating. Cash balance, of course, keeps improving with profitability. As you know, we have just repaid the first 500 million bond and Fitch reaffirmed our investment grade credit. So next slide, please. Certainly what we can say is that Wizz is a lot more resilient business than ever before. If you just look at what has happened to the business over the last three to four years, COVID first, a war here, a war there, and in between supply chain exposure. but we continue to drive the business forward. Of course, we have to process all these external impacts and external shocks in the system, but we believe that we are a lot more capable today than what we were a few years ago. I think you have been very informed with regard to our exposure to geopolitical events. the war in Ukraine and the Israeli Middle East situation. We had to make capacity adjustments and we had to act to the changing circumstances. The GTF issues continue to pose significant exposure. On the one hand, we process those issues operationally, and on the other hand, through a financial settlement with the financial exposure. I think we have a fair deal in place. We made comments on that before, and now the settlement is operational. Uh, and again, uh, we remain very focused on, uh, delivering fleet utilization, uh, through the, uh, the portion of the fleet that remains operational, uh, net of, um, engine groundings. Next slide please. So you see the, uh, the map of the, uh, uh, of the business, our, uh, geographical footprint. Um, we are reporting significant growth, uh, both capacity and, uh, and passengers as far as fleet. I think that is important. that the fleet continues to grow despite all the supply chain exposure. As a matter of fact, fleet growth, new aircraft deliveries are one of the mitigants we are taking to upset the grounding effects on the business. And we just stay focused on protecting capacity, given the circumstances, by extending our fleet program. And you will see the number of actions we are taking there in a moment. So next slide, please. And this is just to give you an update on the GTF situation. I don't think anything fundamentally has changed. This is largely reconfirming what we have assumed and what we have said. So again, certain aircraft on the ground on the 31st of December, 35 as we speak today. We expect 40 aircraft on the ground by the end of March. And as you know, we have taken a number of mitigating actions to protect capacity. With that regard, we continue to take new aircraft deliveries. That's around 30 aircraft in the financial year coming. We have extended aircraft leases. Otherwise, we would have returned those aircraft to the nationals. Now we maintain those aircraft in operation and we also took three aircraft on dry leaves to make sure that we put in contingency for capacity. Also, we are looking at ways of enhancing utilization and sector comes to an extent possible to again to protect the capacity of the airline. With regard to the assumptions around what it takes to recover the engine, get the engine inducted, and push it through the process. Our assumptions remain pretty much the same as guided before. This is a long process, a long, painful process. So this is an issue on hand for the next well to 18 months as we expected. Next slide, please. Jan, over to you.