Sun Country Airlines Holdings, Inc.

Welcome to the Sun Country Airlines second quarter 2024 earnings call. My name is Crystal and I'll be your operator for today's call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session and instructions will be given at that time. As a reminder, this call will be recorded. I will now turn the call over to Chris Allen, Director of Investor Relations. Mr. Allen, you may begin.

Thank you. I'm joined today by Jude Bricker, our Chief Executive Officer, Dave Davis, President and Chief Financial Officer, and a group of others to help answer questions. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that during this call, the company may make certain statements that constitute poor-looking statements. Our remarks today may include poor-looking statements which are based upon a manager's current beliefs, expectations, and assumptions, or are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially. We encourage you to review our risk factors and cautionary statements outlined in our earnings release and our most recent SEC filing. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. You can find our second quarter of 2024 earnings press release on the Investor Relations website at ir.suncountry.com. With that said, I'd now like to turn the call over to Jude.

Thanks, Chris. Good morning, everyone. Our diversified business model is unique in the airline industry. Due to the predictability of our charter and cargo businesses, we're able to deliver the most flexible scheduled service capacity in the industry. The combination of our schedule flexibility and low fixed cost model allows us to respond to both predictable leisure demand fluctuations and exogenous industry shocks. We believe, due to our structural advantages, we'll be able to reliably deliver industry-leading profitability throughout all cycles. I want to start by acknowledging our employees that have worked so hard through this challenging summer. In both June and July, we've grown schedule service departures in excess of 15% year-on-year, while facing some extended aircraft out of service events and an IT outage that temporarily disabled the key operational system. Our employees, like usual, delivered for our customers, and I'm personally grateful. There's been a lot of discussion about overcapacity in our industry. For us, in our key market of Minneapolis, the domestic seat growth rate peaked in July and subsides through the rest of the year and into the next spring. As such, we expect lessening fare pressure as we move through the year. It's encouraging to see the industry move aggressively to right size schedules. Our reaction to changes in market environment will always be to adjust capacity. Our July Minneapolis seats were up 29% year on year. By September, our seats will be down 9% year on year. July's schedule service volume will be two and a quarter times larger than September. September always being the most challenging month for leisure demand. As already announced, we will move capacity aggressively into our other segments, charter and cargo. We still expect a strong winter season for leisure and are planning mid-single-digit capacity growth for our peak upcoming winter. I want to point out that June and July continue to be strong demand months for our scheduled service product. We had sold loads in excess of 85% during both months, with unit revenues up nearly 20% versus pre-COVID comps, even considering our growth. Our ability to manage off-peak capacity while maintaining our unit cost advantage mostly explains the outperformance of our scheduled business as compared to other domestic leisure carriers. In cargo, we have contractual growth along with rate improvements through the end of 2025. For charter, while volumes were generally flat, we've been able to manage to higher margins as we adjust our pre-COVID long-term contracts to the new cost environment. As mentioned before, we have fleet expansion plans to 71 aircraft from our current in-service fleet of 56. All this growth will come from our leased-out fleet, seven aircraft, and from committed cargo deliveries, eight aircraft. In both cases, this growth won't require additional capex. So we expect to continue to deliver high free cash flow yields in the near midterm. And with that, I'll turn it over to Dave. Thanks, Jude.

We're pleased to report that Q2 was our eighth consecutive quarter of profitability, and that through the first half of 2024, Sun Country was the most profitable airline in the U.S. This is despite the fact that, unlike for most other carriers, Q2 is a seasonally slower quarter for Sun Country. The domestic revenue environment continues to be impacted by overcapacity, and the resultant impact on fares is that domestic-focused LCC is the hardest. Our resilient business model has allowed us to remain profitable because of the diversity of our revenue streams. As we move through the third quarter, we are slowing scheduled capacity growth. While our model allows us to make tactical capacity allocation decisions quickly, large moves require several quarters to execute. As we mentioned during our announcement of our revised agreement with Amazon, Sun Country's cargo segment will become a larger portion of our business starting in mid 2025. By 2026, we expect revenue from our cargo segment to be almost 20% of our total revenue versus approximately 10% in 2024. The expansion of our cargo segment comes with almost no required CapEx and drives improved profitability and greater free cash flow. This is the essence of the Sun Country business model. Let me now turn to the specifics of the second quarter. First to revenue and capacity. In the second quarter, total revenue declined 2.6% versus the second quarter of 2023 to $254.4 million. For our passenger segment, which includes our scheduled service and charter businesses, total revenue fell 5% year over year. Scheduled service revenue declined 7.2%, driven by a 21.3% decline in scheduled service TRASM and an 18.2% increase in ASMs. Clearly, we flew more during off-peak periods than the demand environment could support. In addition, we were impacted by late June operational challenges in MSP that reduced passenger revenue by between a million and 1.5 million. In response to this off-demand environment, we're curtailing our growth in the third quarter and expect scheduled service ASMs to be up 7% to 8% year-over-year versus roughly 15% we were originally planning. We expect year-over-year growth to fall further in Q4. The pulldown comes mainly from reducing off-peak flying. Scheduled service ASMs for our full network will still grow in July by about 16% year-over-year, but by September they will shrink by 11%. Average total fare per passenger fell by 20.1% during the quarter. While total fare has declined versus last year, The second quarter was the first since COVID that we flew more ASMs in the second quarter of 2019. And Q2 24 scheduled service TRASM was 12.3% higher than Q2 of 19. Charter revenue in the second quarter grew 2.8% to 51 million, which was a new quarterly high. This result was even more impressive as second quarter charter block hours declined 10.2% year over year. due to scheduling improvements which reduced the number of ferry flights we operated. Ad hoc charter revenue grew significantly versus last year and was 23% of the total charter revenue versus 13% in the second quarter of last year. For our cargo segment, revenue grew by 1.7% to $25.4 million and a 2.4% decrease in block hours. Cargo block hours are influenced by scheduled heavy maintenance events, which drive moderate changes in aircraft availability. We expect year-over-year cargo block hours to grow in both the third and fourth quarter of this year, and then to inflect sharply upward in 2025 as we take on an expected eight additional freighter aircraft throughout the year. June was the first month that a portion of the revised Amazon contract rates went into effect. The full impact of the new rates will not be in effect until the second half of 2025. Turning now to costs. Second quarter total operating expenses increased 7.3% on an 8.9% increase in total block hours. Chasm declined by 5.1% versus the second quarter of 2023, while adjusted chasm declined 4.9%, marking our third consecutive quarter of year-over-year declines. As our pilot availability issues have eased, we've been able to grow flying through higher aircraft utilization, which was seven and a half hours per day in the second quarter, up 11.9% versus the second quarter of last year. Our declining chasm came despite increases in both ground handling costs and higher airport fees. Ground handling expenses grew by 16.6% year over year, driven by a 20% increase in scheduled service departures. while the roll-off of COVID relief payments that airports had been using to minimize rate increases contributed to a 14.9% increase in landing fees and airport rent expenses. As we move into Q3, the slowing growth in our scheduled service business is likely to result in an increase in adjusted CASM. Regarding our balance sheet, our total liquidity at the end of the second quarter was $153 million. Year-to-date, we've spent $38.2 million on CAPEX. At this point, we do not need to purchase any incremental aircraft until we begin looking for 2027 capacity. We continue to generate strong free cash flow, and we still anticipate full year 2024 capex to be well below $100 million. Our leverage remains low with our net debt to adjusted EBITDA ratio at the end of the second quarter at 2.6 times. Finally, the effective income tax rate increased substantially during the three months ended June 30th, 2024, as compared with the prior year due to some additional tax expense related to stock compensation. Turning to our guidance, we expect third quarter total revenue to be between $245 and $255 million on block hour growth of 5% to 8%. We're anticipating our cost per gallon for fuel to be $2.82 and for us to achieve an operating margin between 3% and 5%. Our business is built for resiliency and will continue to allocate capacity between segments to maximize profitability and minimize earnings volatility. With that, I'll open it up for questions.

Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press R11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. And our first question will come from Ravi Shankar from Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.

Thanks. Good morning, everyone. So, big capacity cuts in the back half. That is good to see from an overall industry perspective. Given your unique model and the ability to move around resources, is there anything you guys can do to reallocate those resources to kind of offset the impact on CASM?

Probably in the second half of the year. To some extent, the answer to that is yes, but probably not fully. We've been consistently coming in favorable to our cost projections, and the company's done a great job on that front. Just given the sort of pull-down that we've done fairly recently, we'll be able to offset some of the chasm impact, but probably not all of it. And we'll be looking for reallocation opportunities, particularly in the charter market, as sort of much as we can here on relatively short notice.

I also added our charter operations drive higher unit costs. then do our scheduled service capacity. So it won't be apples for apples as we exchange into cargo, excuse me, charter from scheduled service. And finally, you know, really unit revenue, unit costs inflect when we start operating below minimum guarantees for our crews. And we won't hit that level anyway. So we'll still be in an efficient bandwidth.

Understood. That's really helpful. And maybe as a follow-up, how would you characterize the competitive environment in Minneapolis? We heard reports that Delta may be looking to ramp up there. So has anything changed there?

Well, mostly, I mean, I'm getting the information from selling schedules, which are out through March of next year. And we see July as being the peak growth rate. across our network for all OAs and an improving condition all the way through the end of the year and into next spring.

Very helpful. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question will come from Duane Finningworth from Evercore ISI. Your line is open.

Hey, good morning. Can you remind us how much liquidity you want to keep on the balance sheet? Is there any desire to build up dry powder ahead of the cargo ramp next year? And just given the free cash flow you expect to generate, how are you thinking about capacity for buybacks for the rest of this year?

Yeah, so we're sort of at a liquidity trough for the year at sort of this time, and we'll start building liquidity as we begin selling sort of our winter schedule. And, you know, peak liquidity sort of towards the end of the year. You know, the thing about the liquidity of this business is we think we can operate this at probably relatively lower levels of liquidity than other airlines because a big chunk of our revenue stream is very predictable between our cargo and charter businesses. You know, I hesitate to throw out an exact minimum liquidity number, but it's below, well, below where we're at today. You know, there's really not that much of a need to build liquidity as we head into the cargo ramp because there's really no CapEx required or very, very little CapEx required. You know, it'll be continuing the stream of pilot hiring that we're doing and then a reallocation of some resource from our scheduled service into the cargo business. So there's not really any kind of a significant liquidity need there. That'll be a liquidity positive event for us because of the improved profitability of the new cargo flying. You know, to your second question, you know, we've done well over $100 million in share buybacks, and we'll sort of continue to look at our free cash flow profile. We're paying back a lot of debt, and our debt balances are coming down pretty quickly. So this is something that's always on our plate, and we'll probably revisit and take another look at as we move through this year and early into next.

Just one more thing on that, Dwayne. I mean, typically airlines require a lot of working capital to transition new fleets because of crew training and things like that. I just want to remind everybody that our pilots do all the flying that we do across all three segments from a single base. So there's really no incremental operating costs associated with the transition either.

Yeah, that's very clear. Good reminders. And just to follow up on charter, you know, how do you view the opportunity set now and maybe just operationally, you know, what is the lead time you need to kind of tilt harder into that segment versus maybe scheduled service? Is that, you know, are you looking one to two quarters out or can you react to opportunities closer in? Thanks for taking the questions.

Hey, Duane, why don't I start and I'll turn it over to Grant. So the charter comes in kind of two flavors. One is contracted charter flying and which is under long-term agreements. It's about seven aircraft worth of flying that we do that's related to that. And essentially, it's us being an airline for someone else. And it's the same aircraft that our passenger scheduled service fleet operates. So it's interchangeable, but it's very dependable volumes and profitability. And then there's a big section of charters that's ad hoc, which is booked relatively close in, high margin flying, and mostly a way for us to allocate surplus capacity into profitable flying. And that's the domestic military market that we participate in, a significant amount of sports charters that we do for predominantly NCAA sports and Major League Soccer. So those are a little bit harder to predict because it's close in, but we're pretty bullish on it going into this fall as we've continued to expand that market. Grant, any other color in that?

Yeah, the only thing I would add would be even in the second quarter when we really were biased towards scheduled service growth using up what we thought were pretty much all of our crew resources, we still were able to pivot pretty significantly, as Jude mentioned, to those military trips and those close-in ad hoc trips. and as we look towards the back half of the year, we're going to be very aggressive. There's really – we don't have to wait. Those requests are coming to us, and the team's very poised to go out. And where there's an opportunity where we can do it profitably, we're going to do it. And we have such a good reputation in the marketplace that people come to us pretty quickly when we have that capacity. And when things do get tight, we sort of take that capacity off, but we can turn it on very, very quickly, which we're doing right now.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you. Our next question will come from Scott Group from Wolf. Your line is now open.

Hey, thanks. Good morning, guys. With the capacity you're talking about, are you in the camp of a September RASM inflection? And then is there, in your mind, is there a risk like this is just like a head fake because September's off peak and it capacity starts to re-accelerate in Q4?

No, I think we're seeing a structural change in the growth rate. I think we saw a reallocation of capacity into the domestic leisure market in 22, and then capacity chased that demand into big market connectivity, transatlantic. The Midwest was kind of late to get those capacity growth reallocations from the post-COVID environment, and we saw growth rates peak in July. And, you know, everybody's selling out through April now, so I feel fairly confident that our peak winter schedule will show the kind of profitability that we're all expecting as we move into this winter. So, no, I don't think that's the case. September for us is always... Yeah, September for us is always challenging. So when we cut down capacity, obviously we're able to identify, you know, the flights down to the very flight level that aren't going to make, you know, a positive contribution and cut those out. So, you know, we're expecting a pretty good September, all things equal, because we've had the time to prepare under the current environment, which is substantially different than when we planned the year out.

Thank you. Can you just remind us the timing of the aircraft ramp with Amazon? And then you had a comment that we're seeing a partial impact of the higher rates in June, but we don't see the full impact until the second half next year. Can you just talk about that?

Yeah, so I can't go into the details on how the rates come in, but basically we got a, a partial increase in rate when we signed the deal. So really that didn't have any impact on our numbers until until June. So the effect of the second quarter of the new Amazon rates is very small. But there's this piece that came in when we signed the deal and then additional increases as the aircraft come in. And the aircraft right now, we expect to start arriving in March of 2025. And then to come in relatively quickly so that by the third quarter, they're kind of all on board here. Now, things can move left or right a little bit, but that's the instruction we've been given and sort of the path that we're on.

And so we still... get like this i guess for lack of a better word like two bites of the apple next year where we get the the q1 benefit of schedule and then we get the the cargo ramp in the rest of the year yeah yeah that's exactly right so um

You know, look, we're really bullish on next year, and part of the reason is what you just said. So we're going to be able to continue allocating all of our resources to scheduled service, you know, as much as necessary to schedule service in Q1, which obviously is the biggest quarter for us by far, and then transition very smoothly as things slow down for us into the cargo business more. So it kind of works out really well. Okay.

Thank you, guys.

Thanks, Scott.

Thank you. Our next question will come from Michael Linenberg from Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.

Oh, yeah. Hey, good morning, everyone. When I look at your schedule for the winter, you talk about 55 or more than 55 cities that you're going to serve nonstop for Minneapolis. When I think about what you're going to serve and maybe what you were serving a year ago, it does seem like there's some markets that you have pulled out of. Curious, you know, what is, you know, the common denominator in some of those markets? Was it just they didn't ramp up well? They didn't accompany maybe some of the charter flying that you did? You know, maybe they were sort of part of a package or, you know, it's just the competitive response. Anything we can take away from that?

Well, first, there's seasonal markets that happen across our network. that are going to be repetitive every year. And nearly everything, every market works from Minneapolis in June and July. Nearly all of our winter, I mean, we need more capacity in winter. And nearly everything works, I think everything works in that period of time as well. But they're very different networks, summer to winter. I think the thing to watch is as we go into summer 25, some of our markets will need to be suspended through summer 25 and not come back into the network until future years, and that's because of reallocation into cargo. But our winter network will be intact, yeah.

Okay, that's helpful. And then just secondly, as you ramp and bring on the additional airplanes and you talk about sort of reallocating resources, where are we on on on pilots and and staffing you know first officers versus captains should we see any sort of teething issues as we as we ramp up into 2025 with the additional airplanes coming on for cargo etc thanks thanks for taking the question yeah this is greg uh maize i i think with our with regard to pilots we've been able to allocate resources and and

not be constrained by pilots or staffing really generally. So as we look out into 2025, we don't see any change to that. We see overall industry hiring is way down. So things look good for us. We still would love to have more captains upgrade, but at this point in time, that's not constraining our growth. We feel really, as Dave said, bullish about 2025.

Great. Thanks.

Thank you. And as a reminder to ask a question, please press star 11 again that star 11 to ask a question. One moment for our next question, please. And our next question will come from Tom Fitzgerald from TD Cowan your line is open.

Hi, everyone. Thanks for the time. Can we just go back to capital allocation again and just, you know, given everything with where the business is going and how cheap the stock is right now, why not issue debt instead of paying down debt and use the proceeds to buy back your stock?

Look, we've sort of considered all different avenues here. Debt isn't as sort of cheap as it could be at this point. We're kind of looking at everything. You know, we're sort of making capital allocation decisions here, not just for the next three to six months, but for the long term. We want to continue to operate with a conservative balance sheet and sort of loading up with more debt right now to buy back stock is probably not something that we're going to do in the short term.

Okay, fair enough. That's helpful. And then just like longer term, kind of as you, you know, once you kind of get on past 2026, just how are you thinking about the network and whether you need another focus study beyond Minneapolis? Thanks again for the time.

Hey, Tom. There's not a lot of growth opportunities outside of Minneapolis, other than the stuff that we already have in the schedule, like Texas origination down to Mexican Caribbean markets in the summertime. In the past, we've had a lot of success expanding our Midwest footprint into origination markets around Minneapolis. We also had a nice business in 2019 flying Hawaii. Hawaii is not a great place to be right now. So with the yield environment, there's nothing that's obvious and urgent for us to move into. And so I think what we're, quite frankly, what we're going to be waiting on is some of our competitors to go through some challenging times and free up some opportunity for us. And that's why we want to think about having some powder on the balance sheet and just being able to be dynamic to be able to reallocate capacity when it presents itself, which I think is going to be an opportunity that's difficult to predict as we sit here today. The best thing for us in the near term is, as we talked about, cargo and charter opportunities.

Yeah, this is Dave. I completely agree with what you just said. 25 for us is a year of integrating these new cargo aircraft, taking advantage of the economics of that new deal. And then we'll look at the landscape in 26. There could be growth opportunities here, growth opportunities elsewhere, but we'll see what the landscape looks like in 26 and beyond. And I think given the state of some others, we expect it to be a different landscape than it looks like at this particular minute.

Does that conclude your questions, Mr. Fitzgerald?

Yes, thanks. Thanks very much for the time, everyone.

Thank you. Thanks, Tom. One moment for our next question. And we do have a follow-up from Scott Group from Wolf. Your line is open.

Hey, guys, thanks for the follow-up. So just, I just want to make sure we're thinking about full year 25, right, just with the moving pieces. Can you just remind us how to think about how much scheduled ASMs are going to be down and then, you know, what you think a full year sort of block hours is for cargo?

Yeah, so... Let me sort of just describe it this way. So basically we're going to be taking these cargo aircraft in and that is going to have sort of the first call on the resources that we have here, particularly on the pilot front. Then as we have remaining resources available, we'll allocate that between scheduled service and charter depending on where the opportunity is. So part of this depends on on exactly where we sit from a pilot availability standpoint, frankly going into 25. You know, our current outlook is likely to be down high single, low double digits on a block hour basis, or sorry, on an ASM basis for scheduled service. But that could move left or right depending on exactly where we sit from a pilot perspective. I think we had the block hour growth for cargo next year. Give me one second here. Yeah, I don't know the 25 number right in front of me. We can follow up with you on that. But it'll obviously be significant since we're bringing in eight new aircraft. But, you know, the size of our scheduled service and charter business is going to be driven by, you know, resource availability, particularly pilots.

And any thoughts on what that mixed shift should mean from a just total cost or unit cost perspective?

probably a little premature to sort of talk about that as to what's going to happen with CASM next year precisely. You know, the cargo business is going to consume, you know, some of our resources here, so there's going to be some additional allocation of overhead and other things to the cargo business, so that mix just isn't sort of straightened out quite yet. Yeah, so Scott, just, yeah, sorry, just quickly. Yeah, I think As we sit right now, we're expecting the cargo segment to be up, let's say, 60% to 63% in block hours in 2025 over 2024.

Ultimately, it doesn't sound like anything from what you guys laid out for us in June when you first made this announcement. It doesn't sound like anything's really changing.

Nothing's really changing significantly. I'll tell you, the only trend that we're seeing a little bit is maybe a little bit of improved pilot availability, which would say maybe we could be a little bit bigger next year from a scheduled service perspective. On the call, I said down 10 to 12, I think, percent in the scheduled service segment. Our latest numbers have us more like high single digits. So that's the number that's kind of moving left and right right now. But the cargo... Delivery schedule of the aircraft they talked about on the last call is still relevant.

Importantly, you called out the seasonality of the growth is really beneficial for us. So the first quarter will be intact, and we'll see at least mid-single-digit growth, January, February, March. And then as we move into the year and start taking cargo airplanes, that's where we'll see a drawdown of our SCET business. Okay.

Thank you, guys.

Appreciate it.

Thanks, Scott. Thanks, Scott.

Thank you. And our next follow-up comes from Michael Linenberg from Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.

Oh, yeah. Hey, thanks for the follow-up. But just a quick, as we think about composition of revenue, do we get to like 35% or 40% of your revenue is cargo and or charter for next year? Or am I just too high? Just trying to get a better sense.

I think that number is probably not unrealistic enough for 26, but that sort of 35 plus number and 25 is not going to be that high.

I want to point out block hours, we might get something like that towards the end of next year and going into the subsequent year, but the density of revenue is a lot higher in charter and scheduled service because of fuel pass-through and some other costs too. So the revenue per block hour is a lot lower in cargo just because of the way the accounting is treated for fuel expenses that we don't pay and things like that.

Yeah, I'm just thinking about how that's going to impact your costs and also your fuel bill since a big chunk of your business, it is going to be this pass-through. Okay, no, that's helpful. Thank you. Thanks, Mike.

Thank you. And I am showing no further questions in our phone lines. I'd now like to turn the conference back over to Jude Bricker for any closing remarks.

Thanks for your interest, guys. Three big points. Capacity growth has peaked, and we feel that it's going to be a constructive, fair environment moving through the end of the year. Our block hour growth will continue, but we're going to shift into cargo predominantly. And we're really bullish on our free cash flow production as we have already acquired the growth for the next several years. And lastly, I'll end with just being so proud to be part of this team that executed so well through such a challenging period. This IT interruption that the whole industry had to deal with was severe for our frontline employees, and they executed beautifully, and I'm just so proud of them. Thanks, and we'll talk to you guys next quarter. Appreciate your interest. Thank you.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect. Everyone, have a wonderful day.