Air Canada

Good morning and welcome to Air Canada's fourth quarter and full year 2023 conference call. All participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question, you'll need to press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Valérie Durand, Head of Investor Relations and Corporate Sustainability at Air Canada. Thank you, please go ahead.

Thank you, Julianne. Hello, bonjour, et bienvenue dans notre quatrième revue trimestrielle de 2023. Welcome and thank you for attending our fourth quarter and year-end call of 2023. Joining us this morning are Michael Russo, our President and CEO, Mark Gallardo, our Executive Vice President of Revenue and Network Planning, and John Deibert, our Executive Vice President and CFO. Other executive team members are with us too this morning. Mike will begin this call with a brief overview of the quarter, followed by Mark with comments on our revenue, network updates, and demand trends. John will cover our financial performance and guidance before turning it back to Mike. We will take questions from equity analysts after this call. Today's comments and discussion may contain forward-looking information about Air Canada's outlook, objectives, and strategies that are based on assumptions and subject to risk and uncertainties. Our actual results could differ materially from any stated expectations. Please refer to our forward-looking statement in Air Canada's fourth quarter and full year news release available on aircanada.com and on CDAR+. And now, I'd like to turn the call over to Mike.

Great. Thank you, Valerie, and good morning to everyone. Thank you for attending this morning's conference call to discuss our fourth quarter and full year 23 results, which capped a very successful year for Air Canada. We produced strong results in the fourth quarter of 2023 with operating revenue of approximately $5.2 billion, up 11% from the same period in 2022. Adjusted EBITDA of $521 million was up almost 34% from the previous fourth quarter. We announced record full-year operating revenue of $21.8 billion, up 32% from 2022. Operating income in 2023 was nearly $2.3 billion, That's a $2.5 billion improvement from the previous year. Our adjusted EBITDA was nearly $4 billion, more than twice that of the full year 22, and is the top end of our guidance that we provided, as we predicted last quarter. Further, our adjusted EBITDA margin of 18.2% was once again among the highest in North America. Our performance on profitability and revenue was complemented by effective cost control that kept our adjusted CASM within range. We also significantly deleveraged the airline. We remained committed and acted on our promises, operating against headwinds in our global industry and in the economic and geopolitical environment. We also delivered on key strategic priorities and took important steps to maintain our consistent performance, reaffirming our dedication to our plan. We are strategically adding to our key hubs, enhancing our level of customer service and improving our operational reliability. In 2023, we saw a meaningful improvement year over year in key operational metrics, despite many uncontrollable issues we had to deal with. Among other strengthening metrics, our flight completion factor and baggage handling success rate both improved in 2022. Our on-time arrivals rose by nearly 10 percentage points above 2022 and were above 2019 levels for the fourth quarter. We have seen increased customer satisfaction across the entire system. most significant areas of improvement being the handling of delays, cancellations, and missed connections. These have been a key area of focus for the organization to ensure that our customers get where they need to go. I thank everyone for their hard work and dedication to service excellence throughout the year and for caring for our customers while safely and comfortably transporting them to their destinations. I also thank our customers who choose to fly with Air Canada in 2023. We know that our customers, like investors and other stakeholders, highly value consistency and reliability, which are integral to our service excellence. These are all things we're fully committed to keep delivering and improving upon for 2024 and beyond. Thank you, Merci. Marc, over to you. Thanks, Mike, and good morning, everyone.