Fifteen years of Cargolux results reveal air cargo’s uneven new era
Here at The Loadstar, we’ve been watching Cargolux for well over a decade. It has had its ups and downs – from financial stress ...
© Khunaspix Dreamstime.
By Alex Lennane
Have there ever been as many brackets, denoting year-on-year declines, as there will be in airlines’ financial results this year?
And the numbers are big: Air France-KLM has just announced its 2020 results, which make for rather sobering reading.
Its ebitda loss was a mammoth €1.7bn ($2.05bn), on revenues down nearly 60%, at €11.1bn. Net debt is €11bn, up €4.9bn from the end of 2019.
There was, of course, some better news. Cargo was the star performer, making most flights cash-positive.
While capacity over the year fell 30.7%, volumes were only down 20%, to 880,000 tonnes.
Revenues rose 20% to €2.5bn for the full year, having risen 54% to €860m in the fourth quarter. Unit revenue per ATK rose 76% in the full year, to €0.22, while in Q4, it was up 110% to €0.27.
“December was the eighth consecutive month of gradual air cargo market improvements” said the group.
“The yield and load factors were strongly up, resulting in a unit revenue increase of 76.8% at constant currency, thanks to the gap between industry capacity and demand. The group benefited from a full freighter fleet of six aircraft and a passenger long-haul fleet well suited for the cargo activity (Boeing 777, Boeing 787 and Airbus 350).
“On the demand side, worldwide air freight volumes are down due to the Covid-19 crisis, but are expecting to recover consistently with trade growth and industrial production.
“The supply-demand gap of the past months is foreseen to narrow once industry capacity supply will increase which depends on the passenger traffic recovery.”
You can see the full results here.
This article is © The Loadstar. Reproduction, rewriting, or derivative use requires a license. Contact [email protected] for licensing enquiries.
Comment on this article