Low-cost airline Ryanair slumped to a record annual loss of €1.02bn ($1.24bn) in the 12 months to the end of March, underlining the scale of the pandemic's impact on Europe's aviation sector.
Chief executive Michael O'Leary described it as a "traumatic loss for an airline that has been consistently profitable in its 35-year history", but said the company is seeing signs of strong pent-up demand. The firm said it is impossible to provide meaningful guidance for the year ahead given the continued uncertainty around when and where Covid-19 travel restrictions will be eased and the fact that bookings are being made very close to flight departure dates.
"The booking curve is remarkably close in," O'Leary said. "In the first week of April, we took just over 500,000 bookings. Last week, we exceeded 1.5mn. It has trebled in the space of six weeks. There's a strong pent-up demand for low-fare air travel," he said.
The airline expects passenger numbers to be towards the lower end of its previously guided range of 80mn-120mn for its full 2022 financial year, which runs from 1 April this year to 31 March next year. This would mark a sharp rise from the 27.5mn passengers carried during the 2021 financial year, which the company described as the "most challenging" in its history. But Ryanair's recovery will begin tentatively. The airline expects passenger numbers to reach just 5mn-6mn in April-June, a fraction of the 42mn that travelled with Ryanair in the same period of 2019 before the onset of the Covid-19 crisis.
The company is also "cautiously" predicting that it will be close to breaking even this financial year. This assumes that successful vaccine rollouts this summer will pave the way for European travel restrictions to be eased in time for the peak summer holiday season.
Ryanair's passenger numbers were down by 81pc on the year in the 12 months to the end of March, while the load factor — which measures the percentage of aircraft seats filled — fell by 24 percentage points to 71pc over the same period. The drop in customers slashed revenue to €1.64bn from €8.5bn a year earlier. And Ryanair also recorded a €200m ineffectiveness charge on fuel and currency hedges in the 2021 financial year, triggered by the decline in air traffic and aircraft delivery delays.
The steep drop in revenue was mitigated by lower operating costs, which fell by 66pc compared with the previous financial year. The airline's jet fuel bill came in at €542.6mn, down from €2.8bn in the 12 months to the end of March 2020. The company's €1.02bn loss compares with a profit of just under €650mn a year earlier.
