Deutsche Lufthansa Ag Reg

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the conference call and live webcast of Lufthansa Group Q3 2026 results. My name is Sarah and I am the conference call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in 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 1 and 1 on your telephone. I would now like to hand the conference over to Marc-Dominic Nettesheim, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Sandra, thanks a lot and welcome ladies and gentlemen also from my side to the presentation of today's third quarter result of Lufthansa Group. Today with me on the call is our CEO Carsten Spohr and our CFO Till Streichert and both will present to you the results for the past quarter and discuss our commercial outlook for the rest of the year. At the end, you will, as always, have the opportunity to ask your questions, but also, like always, please limit yourselves to two questions so that everybody has a chance to ask a question. And please note that today we will need to end this call on time because both Carsten and Till need to catch a flight to Lisbon. And with that, Carsten, I hand over to you.

Yeah, thank you, Marc, and a warm welcome from my side to our Q3 earnings call as well. As you're all probably well aware, this quarter was shaped above all by geopolitical tensions and following highly elevated fuel prices, but also by resilient demand across, in our case, all four of our business segments. Our performance, I think, demonstrates both. On the one hand, the strength of our diversified portfolio, and on the other hand, the growing maturity of our industry. The third quarter shows that we were increasingly able to reflect the higher fuel costs in our fares. And on the one hand, surely our improved customer offer and quality on board, on the ground contributed to this. But on the other hand, this is another important sign of a more mature industry as we see a much better balance between demand and supply compared to, for example, before COVID. And also, as mentioned before, the continuing supply chain challenges in our industry for our OEMs and others, in my view, will further enhance this effect in the coming years. For us as a company, though, besides being part of this industry, of course, the customer position remains the focus. Higher fares must be matched by a compelling premium experience in all travel classes. Starting from reliable operations, better products on the ground and on board and of course consistently strong service. That's why our investments in fleet renewal and investments in premiumization remain central to our strategy. In the current overall industry environment, our scale, our financial strength and the breadth of our portfolio and network become more and more valuable. Despite the ongoing war in the Middle East, today we are reporting the highest quarterly revenue in our company's history. The revenue increased by 9% year-on-year to now 12.2 billion euros. The growth was broad-based for the first time this year with our network airlines, Lufthansa Cargo and Lufthansa Technik, all expanding their capacity or production output. The moderate development in cost is particularly encouraging. Unit cost our network airlines increased by just 0.5% year on year. This helped obviously to increase the adjusted EBIT to 1.4 billion euros despite the fuel cost had been of more than half a billion euros. The adjusted EBIT margin reached 11.5%. Flight related ancillary revenues increased more than 20% year on year. Demonstrating the growing demand for personalized offers. This quarter's results was driven by the strength of the group as a whole, as mentioned before. We have Lufthansa Cargo and Lufthansa Technik reporting particularly encouraging earnings growth. And all of our airlines were able to more than offset the additional fuel burden with only one exception, which I will come to in a minute. This demand resilience is evident across almost all traffic regions. The only exception here is, for understandable reasons, the Middle East. Overall, regional RASC at our network airlines increased by more than 5%, driven by a yield growth of almost 7%, while in parallel capacity increased by 1.6%. This confirms that we are more and more successfully commercializing our modest capacity growth,