E24 – more than eight billion lost

The number of passengers for airlines has collapsed during the pandemic, which also affects Ryanair.

On Monday, the low-cost company will present its twelve-month results from March of last year to March of this year.

Figures show Ryanair has made after-tax profits of 815 million euros, equivalent to a deficit of more than eight billion kronor.

This is a sharp downturn from the previous year, when the company posted a profit of € 1 billion.

Passenger breakdown

Ryanair wrote in the results report that the year of Corona was the most challenging year in the company’s history, after European authorities shut down society and imposed travel restrictions.

Traffic collapsed, leaving Ryanair carrying only 27.5 million passengers, down more than 80 percent from 149 million passengers the previous year.

Revenue declined 81 percent to 1.64 billion euros.

“There was a partial recovery during the summer of 2020, when the first lockdowns were eased,” the company wrote, “but a second wave of Covid-19 quickly followed in Europe in the fall with a third wave in the spring.”

Big losses and crisis packages

Other airlines have also reported heavy losses during the pandemic. European authorities have also provided the industry with tens of billions of dollars in various forms of crisis packages.

Lufthansa I lost more than a billion euros in the first three months of the year. The British Airways owner did the same IAG.

SAS lost 1.85 billion NOK a month in the first quarter. Norwegian, which is undergoing its second restructuring within a year, lost 1.2 billion Norwegian kroner during the first three months of 2021.

Ryanair has on several occasions criticized government aid packages for the aviation industry, and has previously transferred French, Danish and Swedish packages to the European Court of Justice.

The company remains critical of the packages, writing in the report that they will “disrupt” competition and keep ineffective airlines alive for many years.

He sees a “strong increase” in requests

Ryanair wrote in the report that it expects European aircraft capacity to be significantly lower in the “foreseeable future”.

The company is also indicating that the vaccine will be introduced in Europe. If most of the population gets vaccinated by September, Ryanair expects a strong aviation and tourism recovery, according to the report.

“The sharp increase in weekly bookings since early April indicates that this group has already started,” writes Ryanair.