7/30/2026

speaker
Conference Operator

Good morning and welcome to the Air France KLM half-year 2026 results presentation. Today's conference is being recorded. During the presentation, participants will be on listen mode only. At the end of the presentation, analysts will be able to ask questions by dialing pound key 5 on their telephone keypad. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Benjamin Smith, CEO, and Steven Zaat, CFO. Please go ahead, sirs.

speaker
Benjamin Smith
CEO, Air France-KLM

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Air France-Klm's second quarter 2026 results presentation. As usual, I'll begin with the strategic and operational highlights of the quarter before handing over to Steven Zaat, our CFO, who will walk you through our financial performance in detail. I will then return to take your questions together with Steven, Anne Rigail, Air France CEO, and Marianne Rintel, KLM CEO. As the entire industry, Air France-Klm continued to operate in a highly volatile environment this quarter, yet we delivered a strong commercial performance. Group revenues increased by nearly 10% to €9.3 billion, supported by growth across all our businesses. Passenger demand remained robust, with more than 28 million customers traveling on our network during the quarter. As anticipated during our last quarterly update, higher fuel prices weighed on Q2 profitability. Our adjusted operating profit reached €484 million, representing an operating margin of 5.2%. At the same time, we continued to strengthen our financial position. Recurring adjusted operating free cash flow reached €920 million for the first half of the year, while our cash at hand rose to more than €10 billion. Fleet renewal remains a central priority to improve our financial and environmental performance, while next-generation aircraft now represent 38% of our total fleet, driving both an upgraded customer experience and higher operational efficiency. So we're going to spend a few minutes on the fuel situation. During the second quarter, following the escalation of the conflict in the Middle East, our fuel bill increased by approximately €900 million compared to last year. However, this remained below the US$1.1 billion increase we had initially projected at the start of the quarter. Thanks to our strong commercial performance, coupled with disciplined pricing and cost management, we successfully recaptured approximately 86% of that additional fuel bill. This once again demonstrates the resilience of our business model in an uncertain market. Looking ahead, while the outlook has improved relative to the assumptions we shared in April, We still expect our full-year fuel bill to be roughly US$1.9 billion higher than in 2025. This reinforces the absolute necessity of maintaining the pricing agility and cost discipline that have underpinned our performance throughout the first half of the year. So turning to slide four, premiumization continues to be a structural driver of our commercial performance and revenue quality. underpinned by robust global demand for premium travel across all our core markets. Premium cabins now represent 38.5% of our total passenger revenues, continuing to expand their share within our overall revenue mix. During the first half of the year, revenues in business and La Première grew by 11%, while premium and premium comfort revenues increased by 13%, both cases significantly outpacing This positive momentum was widespread across our global network with standout performances in India, Asia, and the Americas. I'd also highlight the sustained contribution of high-yield leisure travelers who continue to provide strong structural support to this premium growth trajectory. Turning now to the next slide, our ongoing ambition is to elevate and inspire our customers at every stage of their journey while continually strengthening the global appeal of our brands. During the second quarter, Air France continued to showcase the finest in French hospitality and gastronomy both on board and the ground. In partnership with the Groupe Aéroport de Paris, we launched Paris Stopover, a new offering that allows passengers connecting in Paris at Paris CDG Airport to extend their stay by up to four days, providing travelers a seamless, curated opportunity to explore the capital and its iconic sights through exclusive partner offers enriching their journey before flying onward. At the Cannes Film Festival, the iconic Air France beach once again elevated our brand presence, while this summer our pop-up restaurant in Marseille is bringing our long-haul business cabin dining experience to an entirely new audience and location, reaffirming our presence in key French cities. We also further continue to elevate our ground product, with Air France opening a brand new lounge at London Heathrow Terminal 4, and unveiled an enhanced La Première lounge at Paris CDG, Terminal 2E, while Transavia inaugurated its very first lounge at Paris Orly Airport at Terminal 2, marking a major step forward in elevating the passenger experience across all customer segments. For KLM, the brand reinforced its regional and international visibility through its long-standing partnership with the KLM Open golf tournament, one of the Netherlands' premier sporting events. On the fleet and operational front, I'm delighted to highlight the future entry into service of KLM's first Airbus A350, alongside KLM being named best cabin service in Europe, a distinction that reflects both the dedication of our crews and the consistency of our products' investments. Our loyalty program, Flying Blue, also achieved exceptional recognition at the renowned Freddie Awards, earning the Best Program in the World Award for the second consecutive year. Flying Blue also swept four out of six awards for the area Europe and Africa, including Best Redemption Ability. This award in particular highlights the sophisticated joint work between our revenue management and Flying Blue teams. Finally, on the sustainability and operational efficiency front, we signed a key five-year agreement with GE Aerospace for Fuel Insight. This extends a state-of-the-art fuel optimization tool across all group airlines, allowing us to further refine fuel planning and reduce emissions. Turning now to slide six, we continue to pursue our ambition of building a truly pan-European global champion to discipline consolidation. As you already know and subject to regulatory approvals, we intend to increase our stake in Scandinavian Airlines system SAS to 60.5%. We expect this transaction to close by the end of this year Further, solidifying our position in Northern Europe and enhancing the reach of our overall network. Furthermore, yesterday we submitted a binding offer to acquire a strategic stake of up to 49.9% in TAP Air Portugal. If selected, Lisbon will be positioned as the group's unique hub in Southern Europe, significantly expanding our connectivity to key growth markets, particularly South America, Brazil and Africa. This transaction will unlock substantial synergies for both TAP and Air France-Klm, while offering our customers even greater global choice. Both opportunities are fully aligned with our long-term vision and demonstrate our disciplined, structured approach to strategic consolidation. And now with that, I'll hand over to Steven, who will walk you through our financial results in more detail.

speaker
Steven Zaat
CFO, Air France-KLM

Thank you, Ben, and good morning, everybody. Let's start maybe with a remark about our new definition of operating profit. We had current operating income before, but we changed already to IFRS 18. So we're not only a leader and innovator in aviation, but even in accounting. So having said that, let's start with the good news. You see that the unit revenues were up 9%. We guided that we expected around 60% fuel recapturing and we are now at 85%. That is one-third is related to a lower fuel price. There is $200 million lower fuel bill in the second quarter related to the price. But the main part is coming actually from the unit revenue. We had very strong revenue in cargo. We actually beat our cargo unit revenue with 13% as expected. On the passenger revenue, It was 3% higher than what we expected and also Transavia did 2% better. At the same time we had our unit cost under control. We are still within the guidance between 0 to 2% and I will explain you later if we don't have all these problems with the spare parts we would have done even better. But all in all despite the fact that we have a lower adjusted operating profit we are quite satisfied with this result for the moment. But there's still a lot of uncertainty in the world. If we go to page 9, you can see per business segment how we are performing. So as said, and I come back on that later, the unit revenue is very strong on the passenger side, 8.9%, but cargo is up 26.7%. So cargo is benefiting from one, the fact that people probably, if they need speed, they prefer a plane above a ship, given all the circumstances in the street of Hormuz. and of course there's also the increase of fuel price which always impacts significantly the unit revenues at the cargo. If we go to Transavia, we increased our capacity with 7%. There was an increase of the fuel bill of 100 million that could not be fully offset. So we see that only unit revenue is up with 1.6% and you need around 10% to, let's say, to recapture your fuel impact. So, all in all, I think we could not do that on Transavia. I think we are not the only in the industry which are seeing that we cannot fully recapture what we have, let's say, in the low-cost market. The good news is that still the unit cost is decreasing with 2.5% for our Transavias in this quarter. The maintenance, we grew further our revenues, we grew further our order book. but here we are hampered especially by in the engine sector because we don't have the spare parts to perform all the shop visits which we have in our shop. So we have a reduction in result of the engines. It's compensated by a stronger improvement on the component side especially on KLM engineering and maintenance where we did much better than what we did last year. So all in all the result is more or less flattish compared to last year but there should be more coming when we have this spare part situation solved in the supply chain. If we then go to page 10, then I think the good news is to see that KLM, we see the results of back on track. So KLM actually stabilized the result. We see that Air France was impacted by the higher fuel price, which was partly offset by passenger and cargo unit revenues. We did of course deeply the analysis internally about these two carriers. First, KLM is always a better Q2 than Air France. So let's say if you look at 2025, 42% of the profits of that year was made in the second quarter for KLM, where it's just 35% for Air France. Second, KLM is bigger exposed. to Asia, where we benefit a lot from the higher yields in the market. So all in all that is also one of the reasons that actually KLM could have a higher fuel recovery than Air France. KLM was almost at 100% fuel recovery in this quarter. So with that, you see that it's good to see because I should also mention that the cost control is really there and that we see now a reduction of unit cost at KLM. So the back on track is becoming really effective. If we go to page 11, you see the world map and our business performance on revenues. As I said, very strong performance on the long haul, more than 11% yield increase. First in business, still doing very strong, as explained also by Ben. 11% in yield, almost 2% in load factor up. Premium economy, we grew our capacity almost with 8%, but still the pricing is up 9%. And then economy is at 6%. You see that North America is still holding strong, despite the fact that we increased our capacity by 7%. And of course, Asia and Middle East, where we had a yield increase of 20%. The capacity is down but be aware that it is minus 18% for the Middle East and at the Gulf we are almost let's say at 0% capacity. So we grew the rest of Asia at a very attractive yield in this quarter. Then on the short and medium you see that we increase our load factor and we are slightly up in terms of yield. But all in all, it's not enough to actually recapture the increase of our fuel price. So, very good news on the long haul. So-so news on the medium haul. And I think Transavia, they increased significantly in capacity. They were able to increase also the load factor. That's good. So the demand is there, but the pricing power in this segment is rather difficult, which we also have seen at our competitors. If we then go to the unit cost, so we are up at 1%, which is fully in line with our few-year guidance. There is the 0.4% on the premiumization, which we earn back easily through our unit revenues. And it's a bit of a pity that actually the better operations is not completely visible in our results. We had less wet leases which has a positive impact on our unit cost of 0.6%. We have due to all the fleet renewals we gained in fuel efficiency so we should have gained 1% out of the operations but unfortunately due to all the problems in the supply chain we had higher maintenance costs and at the same time we have a lot of leases for engines and rotables which are included in our unit costs. So all in all that is the bad news on our operations and at the other side you see that we are partly compensated the labor price increase by productivity. Then on the cash side. So on the cash side we did actually better if you look at our recurring adjusted operating free cash flow than last year. Last year we were around 800 million. We are now above the 800 and 900 million. The net debt is more or less flattish despite the fact that we paid 250 million of deferred social charges and wage tax and we also paid the cargo claim. So if we would not have these incidentals we would actually have reduced the debt. You see that the leverage is down with 0.1 compared to the beginning of the year. So all in all the net debt is quite stabilizing despite the fact that we still have this Let's say impact of the COVID years which are still running through our cash flow but that will end from the next year where we will see that we don't have that impact anymore only slightly on KLM where it runs for 200 million on the wage tax till October. Then we go to the balance sheet. So very strong cash at hand, 10.3 billion, much above our targeted liquidity. We put two senior bonds in the market at very attractive prices, so let's say around 4%. I think the timing of the last bond was really, really great. If you look where we were in terms of peace treaty for the street of Hormuz and what happened afterwards. And we also put in place a new multi-purpose credit facility. We didn't draw that. The purpose to draw that actually it is a way to manage the fact that at a certain moment you have to redeem the bonds and to issue a new bond so that you have more flexibility and agility during the year so that you don't put a lot of cash on the bank accounts to secure that you can redeem a bond any time. You see that we reduced the very expensive sustainably linked bonds which had a coupon of over 7%. We did that just after the Ukraine war started and when we had to repay the PGE in France, you see that we repaid the KLM Perpetual which had a coupon of almost 6% in Swiss franc and we pay back this week the hybrid of Apollo with a coupon of 7%. So all in all you see a balance sheet simplification and a reduction of our interest cost. And that has also been, let's say, if you look at the credit ratings, we were reaffirmed in May and June on our credit rating. Then we go to the outlook. So the biggest chunk is, of course, again, the fuel bill. It is still very stable, unstable, sorry. We had 200 million gain in the second quarter compared to our previous guidance in dollars. Q3 you see that we go to 600 up year over year which was 200 million less than what we guided previously which was around 800 and Q4 we are still at 500 so they didn't change so much for Q4 unfortunately because we all expected that the fuel price would come down further because of the US elections if you go what we did on the hedging so we stopped at the end of Q1 our hedging policy we did still some tactical moves If there was any news coming from the president of the US regarding his view of the war, so every time there was a drop in the yet fuel prices or the oil prices, we acted on it. But in general, we restarted our hedge strategy policy during the peace treatment, so that was in June. So we continue our hedge strategy, but we have a maximum price, so we don't do it at any price. and if you look where we are for 2027 you see that we are 40% hedged. At the end of Q1 we were 33% hedged. Usually we should increase it by 10% per quarter so actually we lost around 3-4% in our hedging strategy due to the pricing. We stopped all the hedging by the way for the year 2026 because we have already a portfolio of 67% which is close to the 70%. If we then go to the booking trends, you see that there is a drop in bookings, so it's minus 2 for the long haul, minus 2 for the short and medium haul, but Transavia is up 2%, which is very promising for this quarter. It's always a balance between yield and load factor. We see that there is in general a trend of later bookings. It has probably also to do that ticket prices are higher. So people are waiting and wait that the fuel price comes down, which is not going as fast as we all expected. So what we see up to the first four weeks of July, and I talk about passenger business numbers, we see that the load factor is minus 1%, but at the same time the yield is up 7%. And everybody can then do the math on the fuel recapturing because it all depends what the fuel will do. but you can have an order of magnitude and we still see strong cargo unit revenues not in the 20 ranges but at least you should expect something with a double digit number but at the lowest lowest side of a double digit number so I think I guide you more than I should actually do. If we go then to the capacity You see that we are of course we are getting into the year so we have more visibility of the capacity because half a year is already behind us. So for the long haul it is around 2%. For the short and medium haul we are at minus 1% for year over year. And on Transavia we are at 8%. So in total you see that we will grow this year 2 to 3%. We are very privacy guided 2 to 4% but we all have to see still What will happen in the winter? Because if we have these very high fuel prices, we probably will act further to reduce capacity. And then on the outlook, so group capacity already explained, 2 to 3 percent, unit cost 0 to plus 2 percent, where there is 0.5 percent coming from the premiumization, capex below 3 billion, and our leverage between 1.5 to 2. Before I hand over, and probably everybody knows already in the news, but Michiel Klinkers is leaving his position. He will become VP Commercial Controlling and Alliances in our group entity, and we will have Romain Valent, who is currently responsible for the fleet financing in Air France. I worked with Romain many years when I was the head of audit of KLM. We will miss Michiel. I think everybody will appreciate his honesty and his transparency. So we really will miss him. I think we had a very bumpy road together the last years from, let's say, the capital increases we did in 2022 up to the moment where we are. So I would wholeheartedly thank Michiel for all his contribution to this company. And with that, I hand over to Ben Smith.

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