Easyjet Plc S/Adr (ESYJY) Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Well, welcome everybody to EasyJet's half-year presentation of the results to the 31st of March, 2026. I'm joined today by our chair, Sir Stephen Hester, and the management board here on the front row. We've already released a full presentation to the website this morning. I don't know whether you've had a chance to have a look at it, but if you haven't, I will give a brief summary now before we go through to Q&A. So starting with our performance for the first half, the underlying H1 results were consistent with expectations and were in line with what we put out in the April trading statement. There was a very limited impact from the Middle East in terms of trading, but obviously there was a fuel impact with volatile fuel pricing in the month of March, which caused the 25 million additional costs. We clearly recognise that these winter losses are not where we planned them to be when we set out the 2023 targets. And it remains a focus for us to structurally improve our seasonal losses and bring them down over the course of the coming years. But what's important to recognise is that we've made some important investments. So over the last three consecutive winters, we've added 24% in terms of seat capacity, which is 33% in terms of ASK flown. And that has given us a productivity benefit when it comes to crew. But importantly, it's also given us better aircraft utilization. And our aircraft utilization is now 20% higher than it was in 2023. And what that means is it's back and restored in terms of where it was pre-COVID. The good news there is that we can now moderate our growth as we look forward to the following winter and future winters because we've restored that kind of capacity and we've restored the utilization and that should allow our root investments to mature....