The Lufthansa Group recorded the highest sales of its group history in the past year, but had a slump in profits operational and the bottom line.
Several strikes, pressure on ticket prices through an industry -wide capacity increase and higher costs burdened the result, and the Lufthansa core airline of the same name flew a loss. The result was still better than feared and the shareholders should receive a stable dividend for the past year. For 2025, the group expects an adjusted result before interest and taxes (EBIT) well above the previous year.
Corporate turnover rose 6 percent to 37.6 billion euros from October to December. The adjusted result before interest and taxes (EBIT) collapsed by 39 percent to 1.65 billion euros, the corresponding margin shrank from 7.6 to 4.4 percent. The bottom line was that there was a group profit of 1.38 billion euros after 1.67 billion in the previous year.
Analysts had expected an adjusted EBIT of 1.585 million euros in consensus with income of EUR 37.6 billion, the bottom line was that they only expected 1.054 million euros in consensus.
CEO Carsten Spohr has a significant improvement for 2025 – also because of the ongoing savings program. The flight offer should continue to grow, but still should not reach the level from the time before Corona pandemic. This is also due to the late delivery of new aircraft.
After the Lufthansa share was still listed in red, the paper in Xetra trading then at times gained 7.46 percent to EUR 7.72. Analysts were quite positive. The operating result targeted for 2025 was over the low expectations, but wrote analyst James Gordon from the US bank JPMorgan.
CEO Spohr described a two -part year in 2024. “In the first six months, we still had to cope with a significant decline in operational profit – including strikes, late aircraft deliveries and operational challenges on our hipwains.” After that there was a trend reversal. In the fourth quarter, the group even earned more than a year earlier.
Spohr had had to reduce its forecast in spring and summer: from initially around 2.7 billion to only 1.4 to 1.8 billion euros. Now the result was above the middle of this range. Analysts had recently expected an even stronger slump.
In any case, it is not due to the lack of demand. The group airlines such as Lufthansa, Swiss, Austrian, Brussels and Eurowings promoted 131 million passengers last year, around seven percent more than in the previous year. Sales increased by six percent to 37.6 billion euros.
The passenger airlines were also able to increase their proceeds. Nevertheless, her adjusted operational profit broke up by almost half to a good one billion euros due to the loss of the core brand. The freight daughter Lufthansa Cargo and the maintenance division Lufthansa Technik, on the other hand, were able to increase its operational profits – even if the result in the cargo business remained well below the record of 2022.
The bottom line was that Lufthansa earned almost 1.4 billion euros across the group, 18 percent less than in the previous year. The shareholders should still receive an unchanged dividend of 30 cents per share.
Lufthansa is still a long way away from its flight offer from the time before corona pandemic. In 2024, the capacity offered was still around nine percent lower than in 2019. In the current year, Spohr plans to expand the seat range by around four percent – which would then correspond to about 95 percent of the pre -crises level.
The board promises additional thrust from the takeover of the Italian state airline ITA. Just a few weeks ago, Lufthansa had entered ITA with a minority share of 41 percent a few weeks ago and wants to swallow the successor to the former Alitalia completely in the coming years. ITA should contribute to the company’s profit in 2025, Spohr announced in early February.
Dow Jones / Frankfurt (dpa-AfX)
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