Air France-KLM on Thursday announced a net loss of 1.5 billion euros ($1.8 billion) in the first quarter, as Covid-19 flight restrictions continue to batter the global aviation sector.
With passenger numbers in the quarter down 73 percent compared with a year earlier, the French-Dutch group is pinning its hopes on mass vaccinations allowing global travel to kickstart again later in the year, reports BSS.
Revenues for the quarter were down 57 percent on a year earlier.
“A year into the Covid crisis, lockdown measures and travel restrictions in our home markets and around the world continue to strongly impact the group’s activity,” chief executive Benjamin Smith said in a statement, describing the environment as “ever-challenging”.
Chief financial officer Frederic Gagey warned that the start of the second quarter was also “not showing any notable improvement” so far, with international flights still heavily restricted across much of the planet.
Smith, however, insisted the company was looking forward “to the summer season with greater confidence, hoping that the progress of the vaccination roll-out worldwide and the implementation of travel passes will allow borders to reopen and traffic to recover”.
In the meantime, the airline is continuing with cost-cutting measures, including voluntary redundancies, after raising just over one billion euros in a share issue last month that saw the French state double its stake to 28.6 percent.
But like long-haul rivals including Lufthansa and IAG, which operates British Airways and Iberia, it remains highly vulnerable.
This quarter, Air France-KLM — which operates low-cost airline Transavia as well as the French and Dutch flag carriers — used just 48 percent of the capacity used in the same period in 2019, measured in available seat kilometres.
This is expected to edge up to 50 percent in the second quarter.
With many governments eyeing a return to international tourism in the crucial summer season, the group expects to raise capacity to between 55 and 65 percent of pre-pandemic 2019 levels in the third quarter, it said in a statement.
Air France-KLM booked a bottom-line net loss of 7.1 billion euros in 2020.
