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ICEX:PLAY

Earnings Call Transcript

[Einar Olafsson, executive]

Good afternoon, dear guests. We are here for the presentation of second quarter results of PLAY Airlines. I will take us through the presentation. And during that or afterwards, you can send questions to [email protected] as soon as you'll be able to see on the screen.

Now at a glance, PLAY operated 10 aircraft during the second quarter of 2024 for the fourth straight quarter. And we flew 442,000 passengers in the quarter, an increase of 50,000 year-on-year. Our on-time performance was 89.3%, which we are pretty proud of, as we are the most punctual airline in Keflavik Airport in the month of June, according to Isavia. We can also see here that we have a very good on-time performance over the past 12 months and actually a significant advantage over our main competitor here in the Keflavik hub.

During the second quarter, PLAY turned 3 years old. We celebrated this anniversary in the quarter while we are reaching stability and maturity in our markets and in our operations. In this quarter, we were also awarded the Best Low-Cost Airline in Northern Europe at the World Airline Awards awarded by Skytrax for the second year running. And we were also awarded as one of 10 Best Low-Cost Airlines in Europe. And we climbed 4 seats on the Top 100 list of Best Airlines in the World, and we are there as the sole representative of Icelandic Airlines.

PLAY continued to increase and then enhance our distribution network. PLAY Connect went live this quarter, where we have an increasing number of airlines that are operating in this platform, where you can buy tickets as if it's a single airline to destinations that are further afield than PLAY flies to. So you can book through a PLAY website, take it to places we don't fly to, but we will fly you the first leg or the second leg if you're flying to Iceland.

We also went live with GDSs. That is our distribution system. That's one of the largest in the world. And we are seeing already very encouraging signs in this distribution channel, and I expect great things from those.

We are also proud that our great team of employees is telling us that they are really happy working for PLAY, happy team doing what they do best. And as you can see on different measures, our employees are showing dedication and enjoyment in their work. We can also point out that 20% of our employees have developed into new positions within PLAY so far this year, so progressing within the company.

And now on to the financial results. A quick financial snapshot and on to the highlights. In quarter 2 of 2024, we had revenue of $78.3 million, which is an increase of 7%. This is on the back of a 12% increase in ASK and actually an increase in load factors. So you can infer from that, that the yield is a little bit down, but we'll take a better look at that in the following slides.

We had an EBIT loss of $4.5 million, down from $0.9 million EBIT in quarter 2 last year. And this is, to some extent, affected by the Easter being in the first quarter of this year, but second quarter of last year. But we will dig more into the numbers in the following slides. The cash balance at the end of quarter 2 is $51.4 million, slightly below what it was last year, and also something we'll look at better in the following slides.

Now the income statement. Again, operating income, up by $5.2 million or 7%. We see the ancillary revenues up by 18% and cargo revenue up by 44%. But the basic airfare is slightly down. EBIT, minus $4.5 million, as stated earlier, but we are projecting that the EBIT for the full year will be considerably better than for the year 2023.

Now within the quarter, there were some encouraging signs. April, we encountered some headwind. As mentioned earlier, Easter of 2023 were in April, but in March of this year, which accounted for some of the difference. But we also, as we have said previously, we also encountered softer markets, particularly to and from America, both the VIA markets and to Iceland market.

To some extent, we can attribute that to sort of reduced competitiveness of Iceland, but to some extent, just to an increased competition on the VIA market. And there were also various expenses increasing in April that we'll go through later in the presentation. But what is encouraging is that May and June are showing improved performances. And particularly June, we can see a significant improvement year-on-year, as we expect to see actually in the following months.

Now yield per passenger is down, like I was mentioning, from $131 last year to $117 this year on the back of the increased competition on the Transatlantic market, and on the somewhat weaker 2 market. That was actually somewhat good in the first quarter, but way worse in the second quarter, and we're seeing some softness into the summer. And this results in the total RASK being down by 4% or from $0.053 to $0.051 during the quarter.

On the expense side, we are, unfortunately, seeing an 8% increase in nonfuel CASK and 3% increase in total CASK. And we do list there the items that are contributing to this increased cost. The early Easter, coupled with some capacity adjustments we made in April and into May, resulted in higher unit costs, particularly regarding staff. So we were a little bit overstaffed in the difficult spring months, sort of spring weeks after Easter, which contributed to a higher cost.

Maintenance costs were also higher due to spare engine lease costs incurred this year that we did in order to improve operational resilience. We had some higher airport costs. There are some incentives that come and go, and we were on the wrong side of that this quarter. And then we did have some higher marketing costs. We were trying to counter the softness in the market that we've been mentioning. So we had a little bit higher CASK this quarter than the 1 year before, but we are expecting to see this come down right down again in the latter half of the year.

Now regarding the balance sheet, not great movements, as we have the same number of aircraft from the beginning of the year and until midyear. Deferred income is obviously up as we are selling into the summer at the end of June. And cash is up partly due to the equity increase we did in the first half of the year. As before, we have no external interest-bearing debt. So only financial items we have are because of lease payments due to the aircraft we have leased.

The cash flow from operations are $6 million in this quarter and actually down from last year. Last year, we had a bigger contribution from working capital as we were growing the fleet considerably between quarter 1 and quarter 2 last year. So towards the end of quarter 2, we had a very big contribution from working capital into the growing fleet size and the growing network that we are not experiencing now. So the cash from operation is basically just from the operations and, to a much lesser extent, from the working capital side. Cash is, as before, $51.4 million.

Fuel. So we have the current quarter being hedged over -- a little over half of the consumption at $823. And then you can see the numbers, a little less than half for the fourth quarter at a slightly lower level, and then less for next year. The spot price, when we looked last at, it was just around the $800 mark, having come a little bit down from the past weeks, as the graph there shows. And so we're quite happy with the levels we have hedged our oil at.

The outlook. It is worth noting, and we have reiterated a few times today and in the past traffic reports, that we have seen softer demand in our network due to sort of increased capacity in the North Atlantic market and the Icelandic tourist business being a little bit soft also this year. The slide here shows the capacity increase in the Transatlantic market, actually, on direct routes only, so excluding the hub and spoke, routes that are a much smaller part of the market.

And what we see here is that January through August is a 6% to 11% increase in capacity on this market, which is way more than can be expected of the market itself to increase. So this puts pressure on everybody flying over the Atlantic. And we have seen ourselves and many of our competitors flying over the Atlantic complaining about lower prices this year.

And this is certainly something that we have sensed. But fortunately, we can see towards the end of the year that this massive increase is, well, decelerating, becoming next to nothing towards the end of the year. And actually, if we look at our main markets, we are seeing decreased supply of seats in the winter. So the outlook is much better than the current and the past few months.

And then if we look at another market, which is the Icelandic one. So this is the capacity in Keflavik. We can see a dramatic increase in the first quarter of the year, to some extent, supplied by ourselves because we had 10 aircraft flying or under our control in the first quarter of this year, but only 6 last year. And this was exactly at the same time when the seismic activities in the Reykjanes Peninsula were hitting the market the hardest.

So this didn't bode well, and the first quarter wasn't very good. But we see, after that, that the capacity increase in Iceland isn't very high. And actually, towards the end of the year, it seems to be decreasing. And as most airlines put seats on sale 9 to 12 months ahead, we do estimate that this will not change materially. So again, bodes well for the winter.

But we are obviously also looking at things around us. And although the Transatlantic market is looking more favorable during the coming winter. That market is actually also more seasonal than it was pre-COVID as the business traffic hasn't really recovered. And so we have now planned a seat capacity reduction on the Atlantic market to North America. So we are now offering about 10% fewer seats in quarter 3 and 25% fewer seats in quarter 4 on the route between Iceland and North America.

At the same time, we will be adding seats to the existing and new leisure markets in Europe and, to a lesser extent, in Africa. And again, so it's going to be an increase of 11% and 18% in quarter 3 and quarter 4, respectively. And this is to increase our focus on the market that has served us best and is the one that we are perhaps best equipped to compete on, as we have the right cabin, the right aircraft, the right cost in our system to be able to be able to compete very effectively on this market.

These are only point-to-point flights. So any scalability in network doesn't come in PLAY here. Now we are sensing that the Transatlantic market and the 2 markets to Iceland are still quite soft during the third quarter. So the forward-looking RASK in quarter 3 is, at the end of June, looking a little bit softer than it was last year. So we are expecting slightly lower RASK in Q3 than it was last year.

However, in quarter 4, we are seeing this reversed with a significantly higher RASK for the quarter 3 -- no, for quarter 4, as can perhaps be expected when you take into consideration the slides before this, where we see the reduced capacity, both on the Transatlantic market and on the Icelandic market. And if you look even further, we have, at this point, sold 3x as much into next year as we had on this day last year into 2024.

Now on top of making sure that we will see increased revenue in our business, we are also quite focused on our costs. And there are several initiatives that we have taken and are either in the midst of implementing or are preparing to do so. We are doing several things on the fuel front. To name one, we have equipped now almost all of our aircraft with ETOPS equipment, meaning that there is decreased flight time and fuel consumption to and from America, and further steps are being made to optimize our fuel consumption.

We're also trying to increase automation and self-service in our business, adding kiosks on several destinations and, thus, decreasing manual labor. Our Playfin robot is taking more and more questions, easing the burden on our staff. And many such steps are being taken for us to be able to have things as much automated as possible.

We are continuing to have a great on-time performance, and we will continue to excel there. And this is a path of an operational excellence theme running through the company. This is all made to, obviously, give our customers a great experience, but also to avoid any extra cost that is incurred with any irregular operations in our business.

And then finally, we want to be a lean and simple company, not overcomplicate things for us. So we have put emphasis to have all our departments place extra focus on various cost-saving initiatives. We are pushing our vendors to make themselves lean and lower their costs towards us. And we are making sure that new hires are kept to a minimum and that the total workforce is not increased in the foreseeable future.

But we want to point, out towards the end of this presentation, we want to point out that Iceland is losing slightly towards its neighbors and the fight for tourists. And past COVID, Iceland has not really had any significant spending in or any major campaigns to attract tourists to Iceland. And we can see in the average spending of our neighbors how far behind we are, how much we are lacking in this respect. And the results are for everybody to see.

Although we were doing sort of okay into this year, we are seeing double-digit reduction in tourists and hotel nights money left by tourists in Iceland during the past couple of months. And what we really need to emphasize is that Iceland is a safe place. This is the #1 criteria when people are choosing travel destination, that the destination is safe to visit.

And Iceland, for too many of our possible clients, is no longer deemed safe to visit, although all Icelanders know that it is. The activities in the Reykjanes Peninsula have had no effect on our network or our operations. And the place is obviously far from any populated areas currently. So we have to get the message across that it's absolutely safe to travel to Iceland, and that it's even more exciting than ever.

So to end this, key takeaways from the presentation. We feel that this past quarter has yielded encouraging results within the quarter, despite some headwinds. But cost-saving initiatives have not only been identified but also acted upon across the business to keep CASK under control, and we expect to have that thoroughly so in the latter half of the year.

We are adjusting the network to seasonal demand fluctuations for fall and winter season, reducing the emphasis on the America business and increasing on the leisure business. And we expect that EBIT for the full year to be considerably higher than the EBIT we had last year, meaning that the cash flow for the second half of the year will be considerably higher than it was in the latter half of last year, meaning that our position at the end of the year will be much stronger than it was at the end of last year.

And so this concludes the presentation. We are now open for questions.

[Einar Olafsson, executive]

I see nothing here. It's a blank one. Okay. There are a couple of questions here already. Okay. So do you have an update on the uplisting process to the NASDAQ main markets? Why has it taken so long?

Okay. I do have an update. We are -- well, we think we're close. We are in discussion with administrators about this. We hope to have something to tell you in the very near future, and we will obviously do so when we are supposed to. So we think we're close.

Why has it taken so long? I don't know. Things seem to take longer time, longer than you hope for when you start a project.

Okay. I have questions here, 2 questions. Do you see the income statement for the second half of the year being positive? Is the first question.

And I'm calculating in my head. We certainly see the second half of the year have a very significantly positive EBIT. I don't have the numbers in my head to be able to answer the net income question correctly.

But we can -- we are now almost $10 million or so at the halfway than we were last year. And we're saying we're going to be considerably better at the end of the year than we were last year, which means that we have to overcome the deficit and then quite a bit more. And so we can say this is going to be close to in the balance, but at least a very significant EBIT positive in the second half of the year.

And then another question from the same person. What are the growth plans for the next year in regards to the number of planes in the fleet?

Okay. A little bit just about the aircraft market. The 10 aircraft we have, we did secure at a great time when the market for aircraft was difficult. So we have 6- to basically 10-, 12-year leases on great aircraft at great prices. Prices have risen very much since.

So we are a little bit reluctant in securing new aircraft on a very long-term lease at the high prices that are currently in the market. We, for example, now see that everybody was very optimistic some quarters ago and basically overstretched themselves on the Atlantic and are pulling back now. So we might even be seeing some effect of this come into play very soon.

So we don't think this is the moment to ensure long-term leases for aircraft. We might secure, let's say, 1 or 2 ACMIs for next summer or even next summers to increase our production and capacity during the summer months when the demand is the highest. But we don't expect to take any long-term leases, at least, probably at least for a year or so.

Okay. I have here a question. How do you respond to claims about unsustainable fares in the market, or PLAY's, if they are unsustainable?

Okay. I haven't heard anybody say specifically that PLAY airfares are unsustainable. So I don't know if I should be answering that particularly. But we can, at least, say that in our home market, where we are transporting in the firm market where we are the strongest, our fares are certainly not unsustainable. We're not losing money on those.

What we are losing money on, or have been for the past couple of quarters, is particularly the North Atlantic market. And I doubt very much that any of the larger airlines are feeling the heat because we have a couple of aircraft in the air over the North Atlantic. So I doubt that anybody is affected by that in any meaningful way, right? I really can't say that we have unsustainable airfares.

We continue to have questions. This is nice. So somebody is watching or listening. How do you plan to reduce the company's exposure to liquidity risk over the next few months with continued decline in tourism?

Okay. I mean liquidity is always an issue. The continued decline in tourism is -- well, let's hope that we will not see a decline in tourism in 2025 vis-à-vis 2024. We are sort of now thinking about 2025. We've already set everything in motion, more or less, for 2024. So we think we see 2024 pretty clearly now having -- we have 7 months already passed. We've sold a good portion of the tickets we're going to be flying in August, September.

So we've already sold the vast majority of all the seats we're going to be flying this year. So we are now thinking about 2025. Let's hope that we -- not for our sake only, but the -- just for Iceland in general, let's hope that we don't see a sharp drop in tourism again into 2025, and we are not expecting that. So we're not thinking about liquidity risk necessarily in terms of reduced tourism next year.

I mean those are, if I remember correctly, somewhere around 30% of our customers. And if we see a trough of that, of 10% or something, then that would be like 3% of our passengers that we would have to find some new passengers in those seats, and I expect us to be able to do so. But I really don't expect a decline in tourism into 2025. Liquidity risk is a risk. The more money you have, the better, but I don't necessarily connect the 2 dots there.

I think this is it. And I'm sure everybody's had time to prepare questions, so I think we'll leave it at that. Thanks for watching. Thanks for posting questions. Thank you.