Ryanair Holdings (NASDAQ:RYAAY)’ RYAAY December traffic declined 83% year over year to 1.9 million guests as coronavirus continues to weigh on air-travel demand.
On a rolling-annual basis, total traffic at Ryanair (including the LaudaMotion unit) plunged 66% to 52.1 million. The carrier’s load factor (percentage of seats filled with passengers) in the month was 73%.
Amid coronavirus-led travel restrictions and aircraft groundings, the carrier’s traffic dropped 80% year over year during the first half of fiscal 2021. More than 99% of the airline’s fleet was grounded from mid-March to June-end. The company incurred a loss of €410.5 million in the first half of fiscal 2021. Ryanair expects losses to be even higher in the second half of fiscal 2021.
Due to travel restrictions, the airline expects its winter schedule (November-March) to be only 40% of 2019 levels. Additionally, during second-quarter fiscal 2021 earnings release, management forecast fiscal 2021 traffic to be only around 38 million. This indicates a significant decline from 60 million predicted during first-quarter fiscal 2021 earnings release, which again denotes a massive drop from fiscal 2020 traffic of 149 million.
Zacks Rank & Key Picks
Ryanair carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Some better-ranked stocks in the broader Transportation sector are ArcBest (NASDAQ:ARCB) Corp. ARCB, Ryder System (NYSE:R) R and Herc Holdings (NYSE:HRI) HRI, each sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.
Shares of ArcBest, Ryder and Herc Holdings have gained more than 58%, 15% and 30% in a year’s time, respectively.
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