Deutsche Lufthansa Ag Reg

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Lufthansa Group Q3 2025 results conference call. I'm Moritz, your course call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in a listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a question and answer session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and one on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Marc-Dominik Nettersheim, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you and welcome, ladies and gentlemen, from our side to the presentation of our third quarter results 2025. With me on the call today are our CEO, Carsten Spohr, and our CFO, Till Streichert, and both will present our results for this third quarter and discuss the commercial outlook for the remaining three months of the year. Afterwards, you will have the opportunity to ask questions, and like always, please limit yourself to two questions so that everybody else has a chance to participate in Q&A. Thank you very much, and with that, Carsten, now over to you.

Yeah, thank you, Mark, and to all of you, a warm welcome also from my side. It's just a few weeks since we met many of you at our Capital Markets Day in September, and today then, following this, I'm pleased to share our third quarter figures with you, together, of course, with Till Streichert on my right here. As you have read from the figures published this morning, we can report rather positive developments for the quarter, with quite a few aspects and KPIs showing improvements. The most important one for sure, we are well on track in terms of regularity and punctuality of our flight operations, which serves in the end as the basis for all other improvements we'll be talking about later today. So let me nevertheless start with a macro view of the whole industry. the global aviation sector continues to boom. And over the next 20 years, at least according to IATA forecast, the global passenger numbers will once again double. I think there's very few industries in the world, at least in the real economy, that can count on such a reliable and long-term upward trend in demand. And in the current aviation landscape, strong demand growth meets limited supply very likely for many years to come. And this combination obviously generally works in our favor, even though, of course, there are downsides on the operational side with delayed aircraft. We'll also be touching on this in a minute. But overall, as by now the fourth largest airline group in the world and as number one in Europe, our passenger airlines are are globally well positioned to benefit from this global high demand, especially premium classes. We'll come to that as well. And on top of that, the supply constraints also provide enormous momentum for the MRO sector. Worldwide aging fleets ultimately drive higher maintenance demand and that ensures stable and recurring revenues for Lufthansa Technik. even though we had some setbacks this quarter due to tariffs. Till will elaborate on that. And this balanced portfolio provides stability in macro and economic turbulence times. And on top of it, of course, we have Lufthansa Cargo, where we also own a business that can even benefit from these current global uncertainties. Our industry has become more resilient, and so have we in Lufthansa Group. Through collective efforts and focus, we have regained network stability that sets the foundation for our future profitable growth. The core, as mentioned before, of our whole business model remains a stable flight operation. In this regard, the summer 2025 clearly marked a turning point. especially if you compare it to the three summers before. And this came not for free. We had massively invested into stabilizing the system. We have, for example, extended scheduled flight times. We have brought up the share of aircraft reserves. We have increased connecting times in our hubs. But all this was well worth it. Stabilization came. And on top, of course, significant reduction in ERAC costs allowed us to also have a positive impact in our financial numbers. And now, of course, looking into the future, starting in 26, it will be efficiency enhancements that we will have on the top of our agenda. This, fortunately, goes hand in hand with the biggest fleet renewal of our company's history. Just three weeks ago, our first fleet, The Dreamliner with the new Allegis cabin on board took off to Toronto, and we will get further seven 8.7s almost by the week, actually more than by the week. We get two this week alone, and we'll bring the number up to 34 total very soon. Until the end of the year, we will have received... at least eight brand new Dreamliners, at least according to the updated information from Boeing. And on top of that, on behalf of Airbus, we were able to get and receive the first 350-900 for Swiss with the new product Swiss Senses on board, also just two weeks ago. So now our premium long-haul product, Allegris, is not only available in Munich, but also in Frankfurt and in Zurich. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce take a look at the numbers. In Q3, we were able to further expand our capacities, particularly on the North Atlantic. And despite the somewhat cautious booking situation in spring, caused by the tariff announcement around Easter, we in the end experienced a well-booked summer. Globally, we have seen moderate capacity growth of 3.2% compared to the previous year. By that, or partly by this, total revenue has increased by almost 300 million to 11.2 billion, sorry, by 500 million, reaching 11.2 billion. Our adjusted EBIT for the third quarter remains stable at 1.3 billion, more or less on par with last year. And year-to-date, though, we can report an improvement of already 300 million versus 24, showing some nice progress on this promise of significantly improved results for the whole year. The driver of our financial success, again, is and has been the stabilization of our flight operations. Regularity in Q3 was at 99%. departure punctuality improved by more than 10 percentage point service compared to last year. This brings me to our capacity allocation. Year-to-date, we have mainly grown on our European, domestic European routes and on our North Atlantic routes. And while the third quarter indeed showed some but anticipated yield softness in these regions, the North Atlantic was still our most important Of course, as you well know, supported by our successful joint venture with United and Air Canada. But it's worth to note that the yield softness is, of course, also partly currency driven. Excluding currency effects, our RAF actually remains stable versus the prior year. Looking ahead, We plan continuous growth on the North Atlantic in line with the market. And also, given that capacity-wise, we are still somewhat lagging behind our peers compared to pre-pandemic levels. Growth on the continental network, nevertheless, will be more limited, more or less stable, less than 2%, with capacity discipline translating for sure into improved booking outlooks in terms of load factor and yields. In Asia, we remain cautious regarding growth, given our unfortunately continued structural disadvantage due to the closure of the Russian airspace. However, increased demand to Japan, South Korea and India give us confidence In the winter schedule this year, we offer 43 weekly flights to Japan and South Korea and even 64 weekly flights to India. As a matter of fact, Frankfurt, Tokyo has become our best-selling route in terms of revenue. Going forward, we are also optimistic again for the Middle East already now. we are seeing a significant recovery on our important route to Tel Aviv. We're also happy to reopen Tehran again, which is also contributing to our commercial success in this part of the world. But not only the Middle East services are picking up. Bookings across all traffic regions reflect a positive trend, not only for the coming month in 2025, but also for the first visible weeks in 2026. Up until January, The book load factor is consistently above last year's level, and balanced capacity growth is helping, as mentioned, to stabilize yields. Compared to the third quarter, yield decline clearly slows down in the months ahead, despite ongoing headwinds from a weaker U.S. dollar. So, combined with a favorable seed load factor development, that means our unit revenues are stabilizing steadily. also on the North Atlantic again. And we, like others and our American peers already communicated this as well, we are benefiting in our industry from an extending and extending and extending summer season. I recall that a few years ago I called it the endless summer, but even then I didn't realize that one day summer will last until Christmas. That's more or less what we see right now. Very nice bookings to leisure destinations all the way through the late fall. But even more important, especially for Lufthansa and our business model, is the fact that premium bookings remain above last year's levels, and also, finally, corporate sales are gaining some further traction. Summarizing, our booking outlook is robust, and we are well positioned to capture further upside as demand continues to recover more and more. And with that, I hand over to Till, who will now guide you through the detailed figures of the third quarter. Thank you. Till, over to you.