Lufthansa is back in the black. And that shouldn’t change until the end of the year. Air freight is booming, and passengers are charging for their flights too. The airline summarizes the situation as the pandemic has been overcome economically.
Despite increasing burdens for consumers and companies, Lufthansa expects strong demand for flights in the winter months. “The desire to travel and thus the demand for flight tickets continues unabated,” said Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr. “The Lufthansa Group has put the pandemic behind it economically and is optimistic about the future.” The passenger airlines planned in the fourth quarter with around 80 percent of the capacity of 2019, the year before the outbreak of the Corona crisis. For the year as a whole, it should be almost 75 percent. Despite the usual seasonal slowdown, the group expects an operating profit in the last three months of the year, also thanks to higher ticket prices.
In mid-October, Lufthansa had already announced key data for the seasonally important summer quarter: The operating result quadrupled from July to September to 1.1 billion euros and was thus almost as high as in normal times before the Corona crisis. At the same time, the MDax group doubled its annual forecast to more than one billion euros, which has almost been achieved after nine months. Thanks to the boom in air freight, the logistics subsidiary Lufthansa Cargo alone will surpass the previous year’s record result of 1.5 billion euros.
The bottom line is that Lufthansa earned 809 million euros in the third quarter after a loss of 72 million euros a year ago. Average yields, an indicator of ticket prices, were even 23 percent higher than in 2019. Business travelers and holidaymakers are treating themselves to the more expensive booking classes more often than before. A total of 33 million passengers flew with the Lufthansa airlines in the third quarter, compared to 20 million in the same period last year.
For the first time since the outbreak of the corona pandemic, which was disastrous for aviation, the main brand Lufthansa was profitable again, so that all passenger airlines together were in the black. The result would have been even better without the many flight cancellations due to the operational disruptions caused by the lack of staff at airlines and airports. The costs of irregularities in air traffic amounted to 239 million euros.
The holiday airline Eurowings earned a little less at 103 million euros despite the strong summer quarter. The subsidiaries from Switzerland and Austria, Swiss and Austrian Airlines (AUA), achieved the highest operating margins at 15 and 16 percent.
Lufthansa will pay back its last debts to taxpayers due to Corona crisis aid by the end of the year: Austria will receive 210 million euros that had benefited AUA. For Brussels Airlines, 290 million euros flow back into the Belgian treasury.
