Ryanair posts record annual profit, announces share buyback

Budget airline Ryanair (RYAAY, RYA.IR) posted a record annual profit of €1.9 billion and reported a 9% increase in passenger traffic despite the delay in deliveries of new planes from Boeing (BA). Ryanair also announced a €700 million share buyback.

Yahoo Finance's Brad Smith and Seana Smith break down Ryanair's results.

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Morning Brief.

This post was written by Stephanie Mikulich.

Video Transcript

From the roads to the skies here.

Low cost airline Ryanair reporting its best ever annual profit, passenger and revenue growth, offsetting higher operating costs here.

The airline served 100 84 million passengers, 23% more than the COVID pandemic shares.

They're down.

Why?

Well, there's quite a bit to kind of dive in on here.

Uh Of course, some of the comps might not exactly be apples to apples here or at least, you know, oranges to oranges if you're looking at a big versus of clementine.

Anyway, all of the foods aside, I'm getting hungry.

I think one of the huge things too is the Boeing impact that this company talked about here.

Um They were ultimately seeing traffic grow sure 9%.

Uh but the average fare rose 21% as well.

They're citing a record first half strong Easter traffic in the late March.

So that's where it's kind of oranges, the clementines too because you have a little bit different of a pie that you're looking at just the food references this morning anyway, offset by soft than expected third quarter fares and load factors as well.

Um But this is still a company that uh did have to announce some impacts because of Boeing too.

Yeah.

And I think the travel numbers here for this summer are in question when we're talking about demand, inflationary pressures that so many of consumers are feeling right now.

And that was also called out by their CEO when it comes to what some of the trends that they are seeing bookings for the summer, they're ahead of last year though fares were not as high as it had expected.

So that's something that analysts are very closely watching whether or not we are gonna see it tick up in airfare for this summer.

As many people have yet to book on the air, Ryanair uh also called out on this earnings print and on the call.

But I think when it comes to the demand story, right?

That is really what is in question for so many of not even the low cost carriers, but really even the larger domestic carriers here in the US.

Just what exactly that demand is going to look like as we have this return to normalization, we've seen pent up demand over the last couple of years because of COVID.

And now it seems like we are transitioning into this new normal.

How much pressure that could ultimately maybe put on fares here going forward?

I think is one of the things that people are trying to figure out at this point.

Yeah, big European energy from this company here, travel demand in Europe, they're saying is strong for the summer 2024.

And despite the Boeing delivery delays, they're gonna operate their largest ever summer schedule over 200 new routes coming back to that capacity point.

Yeah.

And they, they sound a bit optimistic just in terms of the improvements that they're expecting to see here from Boeing at this point.