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Air France-Klm Ads
4/30/2024
Good morning and welcome to the Air France KLM first quarter 2024 results presentation. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Ben Smith, CEO, and Steven Zat, CFO. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you for the presentation of Air France KLM's results for the first quarter of 2024. I'm joined today by Steven Zat, our CFO. will be available to take your questions at the end of this presentation. We'll start by sharing the first quarter highlights, and then Stephen will take over for a detailed presentation of our financial performance and the outlook for the quarters ahead. And then after, we'll conclude and take your questions. So moving to slide three, we're looking at our performance over the first quarter. Despite a challenging start to the year marked by further geopolitical tensions, our activity was resilient. Although our operating income is down compared to the same quarter last year, mainly due to both exceptional disruption costs and a slower cargo business that's facing significant headwinds, our group revenues are up 5%, driven by steady capacity deployment, robust load factors, and improved passenger yield, a sign that travel demands remain quite strong. Poor ticket sales are holding firm and point to a promising summer season, generating positive adjusted free operating cash flow in the first quarter. On the balance sheet side, we maintain a disciplined approach, both in terms of available liquidity and financial leverage. Our cash position remains strong, thanks to particularly the redemption of the Oceana 2026 bonds and the positive impact of deferred social charges. Our net debt to EBITDA ratio is broadly stable and well under control at 1.3 times. Our fleet renewal is advancing at a steady pace with the continuous delivery of next-generation aircraft. Quarter after quarter, we get one step closer to our overall fleet renewal targets, a key pillar of our decarbonization strategy. Moving on to slide five, productivity-labor relations is a pillar of our strategies. It stands at the core of our values as a powerful driver of Air France KLM's performance and is the cornerstone of our approach targeting increased employee engagement and alignment with the company's strategic vision. Since January 2023, this approach involves constant dialogue and has fostered since the signing of more than 40 labor agreements covering our entire organization, each reflecting our dedication to fair compensation and the well-being of our workforce. while also remaining in line with industry benchmarks. The dynamic trend in our employee promoter score, as well as our employee dissatisfaction and engagement levels, prove that these efforts resonate with our colleagues. These positive outcomes not only position us as an employer of choice and a great place to work, but they also directly impact our ability to attract and retain top talent. Lieven will now take over and go through in more detail our financial performance for the first quarter.
Good morning, everybody, and thanks for joining this call. So as already indicated by Ben, the first quarter has been pretty tough. We indicated that already with the full year results. We had quite a difficult operational climate, especially related to the spare parts situation. But what is good to see is that we are seeing now actually the fruit of all the measures which KLIM is taking to improve the operational performance. So since the end of the quarter and also in April and May, you see that we are stabilizing the operation at KLIM, which has a positive impact, especially on the disruption cost. And then, of course, also the cargo still coming down in the first quarter, as we also expected, because we know that the capacity was not yet fully there in terms of passenger capacity, which also holds the cargo capacity in the belly. So if we go to page six, you see that revenues further grow with more than 5%. We had a very strong, relatively, Pax unit revenue. It was up 2.1%, especially Transavia had a unit revenue of almost 10%, despite the fact that they increased significantly the capacity, but I will come back on that later. And then you see that we had a hit of almost 160 million on the cargo unit revenue. Part was expected, but we also had an IT2 implementation, which costed us 23 million for the group in this quarter. It is solved now, so the operation is stabilized, but we will still see an impact of around 7 million in the next quarter. But the operation has been stabilized as before. And then we had a tailwind from the fuel price of $144 million, if you include also the additional ETS cost. And then on the unit cost, you see, as we already indicated, there's a minus $100 million in incidentals, $50 million, which was a one-time payment salary at KLM, and $50 million related to disruption costs. But again, the good news is we stabilize now the operations. We have 75 FTEs relieved at the line maintenance because we stopped all the outsourcing of third parties at Schiphol and at the same time we outsourced other C-checks of the 737 and the A-checks on the A330. We are daily busy to manage actually our supply chain but we see that operations are stabilizing in the second quarter and also the starting of the summer at KLM went pretty well. If we then go to the next slide on page seven, there you see the increase of the unit revenue. And I come back on it later. I will just take... I come back on it later, but we see an increase of 1.7% of unit revenues at the passenger business, despite the capacity growth of almost 4%. Cargo, a minus 26%. not as much down as in q4 but again we had this 23 million of this i t system change then the positive surprise and the positive news is that we grew capacity at transavia in let's say the most difficult season and we see that the unit revenue went up with 10 and we improved even our operating result despite the fact that this is a loss making quarter always for our low cost activity so This is a very good sign what to come in Q2 and Q3 on Transavia. We have stable operations and we see demand is there. Then on the maintenance, despite the fact that maintenance is working in quite a difficult environment, we see that we grow further our third party revenues, especially on the next generation aircraft and there's new fleet phasing in from external customers. We grew our revenues with more than $40 million on the components, especially a 60% growth on the 787 fleet and on the engines. We saw that now the issues on the G19s are solved, so that brought another $70 million in our engine shop and we grew with our CFM platform with 50 million. So stable and significant increase in our revenues third party for the maintenance and also growing our operating result. On page eight, you see the results per airline. So to start with Air France, minus 68 million. You should take into account that the flying blue miles are now reported separately. So that has a negative impact if you compare year over year for Air France and KLM. And then we had, especially on Air France, or it was actually only on Air France, the IT tool implementation impact. So if you disregard that 26 million and you disregard the carve-out of Flying Blue, Air France was more or less flattish. And KLM, as already indicated, 50 million coming from the one-time payment in salary and 50 million coming from a high customer compensation in January and February. It's interesting to see that if you look at Flying Blue, we have now a margin of 24%. We didn't restate 2023 because that's pretty difficult in all the accounting flows we have over there. So from next year, we will report year over year, but it's good to see that actually the flying blue is delivering the result even better than we expected at the group. On page nine, you will find the world map. So as already indicated, we had an increase of capacity of 4.5% with a revenue increase and yield increase of 1.5%. And again, we increased our load factor. On the premium side, you see that the yield is dropping with minus 0.6, which is fully related To a mixed impact, we grew capacity to Asia, which has a longer stage length. So if you just take that out, actually the network impact only at Air France is already 1.8%. So the negative yield has nothing to do with lower pricing in the premium, but is all related due to the network mix. On the long haul, still a strong performance. We grew 4% with a further increase of load factor and a further increase of yield. In North America, we had a stable yield, but driven also by an increase of our load factor of almost 2%, despite the fact that we increased the capacity over there further with 3.3%. And then on South America, that is just a fine-tuning of our network in South America. We didn't actually adjust significantly there the capacity, but we needed some planes to fly to Asia. So it's just an small adjustment and you see that the the load factor is still at 90 with a very strong yield environment and even further increasing by 1.1 percent then the caribbean so we reduced capacity by 14 but the good news is we increased the ticket prices there with 11 so actually we compensate with the ticket prices the reduction of capacity and the reduction of revenues and then on africa we know that we have a difficult geopolitical context over there So we reduced capacity by minus 5%, but actually we still hold quite high yields in the whole region, which were up 2% with a load factor of 85%. And then the big increase is coming from Asia and the Middle East. So we doubled the capacity to China. We grew to Japan with more than 60%. We doubled the capacity to Korea. And then you see that this increase of capacity has also an impact on our yields. Of course, the Middle East was still hampered by the geopolitical situation. If you carve out the 6.9% drop in yield, you will see that around 10% is coming from the Middle East and for Asia, the rest of Asia is minus 7%. And we see still very strong bookings in Southeast Asia, especially in Vietnam and in Thailand. On the short and medium haul, we grew slightly with 2%, but also the yields we increased further by 2.6% and load factor still further going up. And then Transavia, 11% more capacity with a drop of 2% in load factor, but with a 12% increase of ticket pricing. So very promising for the next quarters to come for Transavia. Then we go to page 10. So we had a positive free cash flow, especially supported by the promising summer ticket sales. There was 1.5 billion coming from the ticket sales. And then as we already signaled into the market, we had a one-time payment of the Air France flight. So on the pilot for Air France, so that was 610 million. and we had a quarter of 120 million of the diverse social charges and wage taxes at KLM. So in total, there is an exception of 730 million in. If you add then also, as we always do, the payment of the lease debt and the net interest costs, because we changed actually the definition of operating free cash flow, we took out the net interest costs as we actually following a new IFRS directive which will put in place, I think in 2027, this way of reporting the cash flow. First, you see 140 million if you take the IFRS definition. If you take out the exceptionals and you add the payment of lease debt and net interest, you see that we have a recurring adjusted operating fee cash flow of almost 600 million. Net debt stable. or 140 million coming from the operating free cash flow, but we had new leases to be extended, so that was 160 million, and there's a small currency impact. So we get to 5.1 or 2 billion in terms of net debt, a stable leverage of 1.3, and despite the fact that we paid back 450 million on the OCEAN and we paid the exceptionals on the pension fund to the CRPN, we have still a very strong cash of almost 10 billion. Let's then look forward on page 12. And we indicated already during the full year results that we are aiming at an increase of unit costs of 1 to 2%. We reconfirmed that again. You see that we reached the 4% exactly in line as we guided the market. And there were one or slightly disruption costs already explained and the one-time payment of the salary at KLM. So if you take that out, we would be at 2.4. And for Q2, we guide a 2% increase of unit cost. At the same time, we increased our transformation. So we had 700 projects running. We increased further. We speak now actually weekly on the profitability improvement for our both airlines and at the group level, and we will further go with reducing overhead and creating further synergies. We stopped hiring support staff, so there's a full hiring freeze for people on the SG&A. And we are stabilizing, and this is very important, our operations. So KLM took significant actions. As already mentioned, they stopped the third-party line maintenance. They outsourced the 737C checks to KLM UK Engineering. They outsourced the A330A checks to Sabena Tactics. And it really improved the operations. And it was very good to see that now with May, actually the summer period starting, we were improving again our operation, despite the fact that we also increased significantly the capacity. So with stabilizing operations, with continuing on the transformation and stop hiring of support staff, we are fully confident with the 1.2% increase of unit costs. Then on page 13, you see the forward booking curve. So we are more or less in line with what we had last year. So 75% of Q2 capacity is already sold on the long haul. On the medium haul, 65%. And on Transavia, it's 71%, slightly below. But we have an increase of capacity, don't forget that, of 10% to 15%. And we see very strong yields in that market. On page 14, you see the new hedge policy. So we are actually almost 70% hedge now. You will see that in Q2, the fuel cost will go up. So the fuel price has a negative impact of more than 100 million year over year. But we will expect with the current forward that Q3 and Q4 will be better in terms of fuel price. So fuel price is dropping, yet fuel is actually expected to be at 9.11%. dollars per metric ton in the market and especially the crack is coming down since the beginning of the year to levels of around 20 dollars per barrel which is a little bit what we have seen before covet or especially before the ukraine war so on page 15 you see the outlook so it's a little bit boring at the group capacity we reconfirm again the five percent versus 2023 The unit cost, we reconfirmed the 1 to 2% growth with a Q2, a plus 2%. And the net capex, we reduced to safeguard our cash to 3 billion for the full year. With that, I hand over back to Ben. Okay, thank you, Steven.
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