Air Canada

Good morning and welcome to Air Canada's first quarter 2024 results conference call. All lines are in the listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, we will conduct 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, Juliane. Hello, bonjour, et bienvenue à notre première revue trimestrielle de 2024. Welcome, and thank you for attending our first quarter call of 2024. Joining us this morning are Michael Russo, our President and CEO, Mark Gallardo, our Executive Vice President of Revenue and Network Planning, and John Wiebert, our Executive Vice President and CFO. Other executive team members are with us as well this morning. Mike will begin this call with a brief overview of the quarter. Mark will provide comments on our revenue, network updates, and trends, and John will speak on our financial performance before turning it back to Mike. After which, we will take questions from equity analysts. I remind you that 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 materially differ from any stated expectations. Please refer to our forward-looking statements in Air Canada's first quarter news release available on aircanada.com and on CEDAR+. I now would like to turn the call back over to Mike.

Great. Thank you, Valerie. Good morning. Bonjour. And thank you for joining us. Our first quarter results were solid and largely in line with our internal expectations. They show we perform well from both the financial and operational point of view in a more complex environment. This success reflects upon the quality of our management team and employees, our strategic execution, and the remarkable strength of our brand. For the quarter, we reported operating revenue of more than $5.2 billion, an increase of nearly $340 million from a year ago. Adjusted EBITDA was $453 million, up $42 million from the prior period. and our operating income shifted to a profit of $11 million, up $28 million from the prior year. Our leverage ratio improved to 0.9 at March 31, compared to 1.1 at the end of 23, and 5.1 at the end of 22. Also important in the long term, we continue to reduce gross debt as part of our ongoing commitment to strengthen our balance sheet. Very pleased to see our efforts were recognized by the credit rating agency community and welcome S&P's recent upgrading to double B. At the close of the quarter, our total liquidity was $10 billion. We are confident about our performance for the balance of 2024 and that we will deliver on the full year guidance we provided in February. I take this opportunity to thank all our employees for their hard work this past quarter. Winter is challenging every year, and our employees rose, as they always do, to the task of safely transporting nearly 11 million customers to their destinations. with care and with class. More than this, they did so while making meaningful improvements to our operation. Notably, our system-wide on-time arrival rate in the quarter increased a full 13 percentage points from the first quarter of 23. We achieved these and other improvements in operational metrics through careful planning, diligent execution, and without regulatory intervention. These achievements are obviously important to our customers, and they also reflect increased efficiency of our airline, which in turn benefits our shareholders. I also thank our customers for their loyalty in choosing Air Canada. We are committed to continuing to earn this loyalty by making even more improvements to better serve them in the future. Thank you. Over to you, Mark.