Norse Atlantic As

Very good morning everyone. Welcome to Q2 reporting of North Atlantic Airways. My name is Bjorn Larsen. I am the CEO and founder of the company and together with me I have presenting today Anders Jolmås, our CFO. We shall take you through Q2, obviously. We will look a little bit into the near future, and we'll talk a little bit about the outlook for the further future. So we look forward to do that. First, as I said, we're going to take a little snap on the disclaimers. Here they are. And then we proceed to the quarter two of 2024. Quarter two, when it culminated, was actually the end of the first year of our full operation. We started operating in 2022, but we have gradually built our fleet to the current size. And only in Q2 this year, we did complete the four quarters that encompass a full year of operation. Bear in mind that from the start-up until now has been really a period of strong growth. Growth typically costs, also in our case it does, but as you will see we have a fairly good control on the costs and they are on the way down. we had very strong growth in the quarter in terms of passenger numbers and in terms of flights the market was a bit softer than previous years so the ticket prices were a bit less partly caused by the market but also partly caused by the fact that the month of April this year did not contain Easter like we had last year so we had a little bit of a dampening effect. So when we are going into the numbers you'll see that the specific fares we had were softer but bear in mind that it was a lower yielding period than the same quarter last year. Also, I could say that April and May were at a lower level than expected. June came out as a profitable month, although we are not going specifically into month by month. We saw that the trend with a very weak start of the quarter eased up a little bit as we came along. We don't only make money from carrying passengers, although that is our main focus. We do cargo, and the cargo market was quite big in terms of volume, but the yields, in other words, the dollar per kilo or dollar per ton we receive, were actually going down. So in terms of revenues, it was fairly sideways. And we're going to touch on the charter market. As we have told the market earlier, we actually have refocused, sort of evolved our strategy to become more of a charter company and combine that with scheduled flying whenever that is profitable. And we have started to see the results of that shift of strategy. And I look forward to take you a bit more into those details. Very strong operational performance. We have a very robust organization, excellent crew, I would even say fantastic crew that carry out the mission every single time. Our regularity is as good as anybody's in our field. and we completed 99.5% of the flights that we had put on for sale this year. I think we are absolute Premier League when it comes to completion. Punctuality at 80% with our very busy airports. We don't fly from two small airports to another small airport. We fly to very busy airports where we quite frequently face ATC delays, et cetera. So a punctuality of 80%, we are quite happy with it, although we always want it to be as close to 100 as we can. But very robust and good organization. We have grown quite a bit year on year. you would see that the load factor, in other words, the number of seats that we sell have gone up by 7% this quarter compared to last quarter. So we are now at 82% of all the seats that we are flying are filled with customers. And in terms of actual numbers, this quarter we flew more than 400,000 passengers, which is more than double of what we did same quarter last year. The fares as you can see from here has gone down a bit as I said partly due to Easter for the first part of the quarter and then due to a softening of the price landscape across the Atlantic and as you know we always aim to have the best fares that is our strategy we want to be the The airline you go to where you're sort of guaranteed to have the best, more value for money, so we give you a great, comfortable ride, but we need to have the lowest fare to be attractive to our customers. And obviously when the market goes down, we also have to adjust accordingly. And in order to have the best fares, we need to have the lowest costs. So we are working very hard every single day to reduce our costs, and we can do that in many different ways than we are. So you can see that our cask, the cost per available seat kilometer has gone down by 35% from Q2 last year to Q2 this year. This is actually artificially good, put it this way, because Q2 last year we had less activity, but yet quite a lot of the same expenses. So I think as you move into Q3 this year, then you can compare apple to apple, but it's still going to be a very good development in terms of cask. The PRASC, the revenue, the passenger revenue per seat kilometer softened across the Atlantic in our segments, and we're down by 13% in total. Our business model is such that we can actually allow our customers what they want to pay for and what they don't want to pay for. So we have an a la carte menu where you could either buy just a ticket and then you can buy ancillary revenues or you could buy a bundle with a lot of things included. A lot of people, they elect to buy ancillary revenues on the side of their ticket. and we are the number one airline in the world in terms of ancillary revenue per passenger. We have been that for a while and we are maintaining that position and our ancillary revenue per passenger actually went up 8% in the quarter compared to last year. Now this is the beauty. So we said to the market that we are gonna refocus. We are not gonna fly heavy schedule flying in periods where demand is lower. We are gonna seek more attractive employment for our aircraft when we see there is a demand to charter them out. And we started this strategy a half year ago in a wider scale, and we were very successful in Q2 getting a lot of charters. During the summer, we were sold out. We had so many calls. We almost had to get a new phone number because we could have flown a lot of charter during summer as well. And then going into the fall this year, we see the same trend. I'll touch a little bit back on why charter is very important for us, but this just shows that the decision we made to go into the charter market was very important for us and will be very important going forward. The good news is that those who have actually chartered our aircraft, they love it. We have a lot of return customers, and they are very explicit, you know, about our product is way better than anything else they had. So we are really proud of the product. The product is a beautiful aircraft, but it's also a great crew. And the combination is very attractive to chargers when they can get it at a very competitive price and when our aircraft are the most fuel-efficient and economical aircraft in the market. Over to Anders.

Thank you, Björn Torre. Hello, everybody. Let me go through some of the numbers for Q2. We report revenues of $164.76 million this quarter, which is up 65% compared to the same period last year. Absolutely driven by the more than doubling of capacity, our ASK increased by 105%. Also, the load factor increased from 75% to 82%. However, on the negative side, and as commented by Bjorn Tore, the per passenger revenue decreased by 11% due to the softening of the transatlantic market. The cost side is reflecting the increased activity and also certain economies of scale, leading to an EBITDA of $3.2 million in the quarter, compared to 2.2 in the same quarter last year. The bottom half of the income statement with variable aircraft rentals, depreciation and amortization, net finance cost, together those three items constitute the accounting cost for our leasing, for the lease of our aircraft. However, when you compare that to the cash cost of the same, those are $6 million higher, meaning that the bottom line here, which is negative $31.6 million in the quarter, would have been $6 million better had it not been for these IFRS accounting rules. Looking at the cash flow, operating cash flow was neutral, slightly positive in the quarter, negatively affected by the seasonality of the booking pattern during summer, meaning that a lot of bookings come in close to the time of flying, an effect that was even further strengthened this quarter. We saw a lot of bookings coming in late and later than they did in the comparative months last year. Investing cash flow is mainly maintenance reserves and an ordinary maintenance of the aircraft, financing cash flows of $3.8 million, leading to a net change in free cash of negative $9.2 million in the quarter. So total cash was then end of the quarter, $24 million. Keeping in mind, we have earlier said that we have had a dialogue with the credit card companies, and this is prior to the release of cash from the credit card companies that we announced later in July. Looking at the balance sheet, there are a couple of items here that we normally point to. One is the quite enormous amount of credit card receivables of $154 million, which again increased a lot due to the effects just mentioned that bookings came in later this year than they did last year. This compares to the deferred passenger revenue of $123.9 million. Our equity is negative by $178.2 million. Keep in mind these accounting effects, and since date of inception, as we say to the writer, we have accounted for and accumulated $155 million more of leasing costs than the actual cash costs paid to the lessors, which is very important when you look at our balance sheet. So for now, those were the comments to the Q2 numbers.

Thank you. All right, let's look a little bit further into the future, into the rest of the year. So as we have signaled when we released our traffic figures for July, July was actually a bit softer this year than expected and softer than we saw last year. partly because the transatlantic market was a bit lower in fares, but also because we had about 20% of our flying to and from Paris. And believe it or not, but people did not want to fly to Paris during Olympics. So we were flying a lot of people from Paris during that time, but very few people went to Paris. And that resulted in a lower load factor than we typically would have on those routes, which were about 20% of our production. August, on the other hand, is stronger than last year. So we see it looks like a lot of people shifted their vacations from July to August. And we think that might be a trend in more than one country. Also bear in mind that majority of our customers, way more than half our customers are American. So we don't necessarily follow the European vacation periods. And the rest of the year, although it's too early to tell how it's going to end, but the rest of the year is trending better than last year in terms of sales numbers on the routes we have for sale. So it's a positive outlook for the year. We have a fleet of 15 aircraft. 12 of these aircraft are sister ships. They look the same. They are the same length. They have the same characteristics. They have the same spare parts and everything. So, you know, you have one aircraft or you have 12. I mean, you sort of a set up to handle all 12. And then we have three aircraft that are slightly shorter. So the ones, the 12 are the dash 9s, and the three are the dash 8s. The dash 8s have a different configuration. They have less number of passengers, so you can't sort of swap one for the other. and they are older and have a shorter remaining lifetime. Also from our side, we have a shorter remaining lease time for those aircraft than we have for the rest of the fleet. We haven't used those aircraft in our own operations. What we have done is that we have sublet them to another airline ever since the day we got them. And at a decent profit, fair for both parties, but they were due to come back to our fleet early 2020. next year and we have now agreed with the lessor of those aircraft that we can return these aircraft early to the lessors. We are very much in the money in the sense that these aircraft and the leasing rates are better than the market so it's a win-win and we are we have reached a deal with the leasing companies that we think is attractive for us and we think is attractive for them. Also, it will give us a significant P&L profit and it will inject further cash into the company whilst we don't have to put them into our own operation come next year. So that's two good things. One, we can still maintain a uniform fleet of aircraft and secondly, we don't have to grow further because our ambition now is not growth, it's profits. We really need to develop what we have into a 12 months profitable machine and it fits us very well not to grow further at the current stage. So I think it's a very positive development for the company, and it also is a proof that what we have seen so far, that we have very attractive leases, and that it is undervalued in our balance sheet. It's really a good testament to that and an example of that. We have agreed the main terms of the deal. There are still documentation and things to be done and the re-delivery has not yet taken place and we'll come back to the market when that happens. And then finally, let's talk about the future beyond. And for us, as an airline, it has been a journey where we have seen, where we have learned a lot. We have first of all learned that we have very attractive assets, the aircraft, but also the crew. Great crew that delivers our promises again and again. And our ambition is definitely to be the customer's preferred choice, having the best fares and the greatest value. But at the same time, we see that our aircraft is very much in demand in the worldwide market who are looking for wide-body aircraft. There is a shortage, and the shortage is caused by a number of things, including both the major manufacturers' inability to deliver wide-body aircraft when they should. So right now, there is a lot of strong legacy airlines and new ones that have not received their aircraft. They have sold their tickets, made their plans, hired organizations, et cetera, but they don't have aircraft. So since we shifted our strategy to say that we are gonna do much more charter in the future than we have done in the past, we received a lot of incoming calls, as I said. In the current situation, we are negotiating with a couple of larger groups who want to take more than one aircraft for more than one year. And for us, these deals will be transformational. So we expect that we will put away more than 50% of our fleet into charter activity in 2025. That is a big shift from the current strategy or rather what we have been doing. It is just affirming that the strategy we have chosen has been successful and that there is a huge demand for these aircraft. Obviously, these charges are profitable. They're also allowing us to de-risk a bit the operation. We really want to ensure stability, 12 months profitability, and concentrate on the routes that we know are the most profitable and take away the less profitable or more risky routes. And finally, it's great for us because a typical charter contract, or an ACMI contract as we call it, is a contract where the charter will pay for the fuel. So whether the fuel price is $1,000 a ton or $700, we have zero risk on the fuel price. So it's also de-risking our business, which we think is good for all of us in the current situation. So I think that sort of leaves the big picture from us. Going forward, you'll see a lot more charters, a lot more secured income, and we will be back to the market, obviously, whenever we have something major to report. But at the moment, there are a couple of ongoing negotiations that would take away more than 50% of the fleet if we are successfully concluding it. I think that's what I could say for now. Anders, anything to add on here? Nothing for me? Well, if anybody in the audience have any questions, I'll be very happy to answer.

Yes, sir. Thank you. Repeat my question there. The main drivers for cost drivers in Q2 and H1, they are personnel and jet fuel. Jet fuel can be explained as you increase your capacity with 20% in Q2. But personal expenses increased much more than I can account for in terms of your expansion in fleet. That's number one. And can you be a bit more specific on the new terms with the credit card acquirers? How does this impact your cash flow going forward? And yeah, I think that's also good.

Great question. Yes, our personal expense went up from $23, $24 million to $32 million. So it was a significant increase year on year, but the production went up by more than that percentage-wise. So actually that sort of took the cask down because per ASM, our personnel costs went down. It went up in nominal terms, but it went down in terms of ASM. So we are having, I think that shows a good development. Fuel, as you said, is what it is. When it comes to the credit card terms, maybe Anders, you would like to comment?

I can say a few words on that. We have previously reported that we had a stable, flat 60-day holdback period throughout the year, which is really not suitable for a company like us, where the book-to-fly pattern varies a lot throughout the year, where we see a lot shorter book-to-fly during summer and somewhat wider during winter. So now the new terms are reflecting more this dynamic seasonal pattern where we in the months where we have a lot of bookings, where there's a lot of things happening, we'll collect cash a lot earlier in the cycle. And that was agreed during month of July, and also, as we have stated in the press release late July, reflected in some cash release to us from the credit companies late July, not reflected in the cash position here today.

And I think the question you answer is very, very relevant because for us to be a viable airline that can be a 12-month profit, we have to have control of cost. And we have by far the lowest cost in our segment today, and we are getting lower. Also, the shift of strategy enables us to go even further down, because if you fly, the more scheduled you fly, the bigger is your overhead cost. You have a lot of SDNA in scheduled flying that is actually much less when you do charters. So we are able to reduce our cost quite significantly when it comes to our overheads.

It came to the market knowledge late yesterday evening that JetBlue, one of your competitors, who are operating from London Gatwick to New York and Boston, they will shift their Gatwick operation to Heathrow for the coming winter season. How will this impact your New York operations, Bjørn Børre?

You're absolutely right. So in summertime, we are three airlines fighting fiercely. This summer, we have been three airlines fighting fiercely for the Gatwick to New York market. We're the biggest, or actually it's four, BA as well. We're the biggest because we're flying a double daily to London. And then you have a company like JetBlue, which is now pulling out. And I'm not going to comment on other companies, except I can see they are pulling out. I think we are very competitive. Another company flying there is Delta. They're also pulling out. And the third one, British Airways, is reducing their flights from Gatwick to New York. For us, Gatwick is really our home in the UK, and I think we are recognized now as the leading carrier from Gatwick to America. And I think the fact that others are concentrating elsewhere is a good sign for us and our competitiveness. No other questions. I would like to thank everybody, both those who are here and everybody who has been online. It's always a pleasure to meet. And if you have any questions at all, please convey them to Anders and his team, and we'll answer them as good as we can. Thank you very much.