The recent trend of European airline bankruptcies will continue and Ryanair aims to take advantage, Michael O’Leary has said.
The plight of Monarch, Air Berlin and Alitalia is likely to be repeated by “other financially troubled EU airlines”, the carrier’s CEO said.
O’Leary was speaking as the airline posted strong results for the six months to Sept 30 2017, which included a 7 percent year-on-year revenue growth to €4.43bn, and 11 percent profit growth to €1.29bn.
Listen: Ryanair's Kenny Jacobs outlines the airline's major commercial priorities
“We are responding to these opportunities by continuing to grow in Germany where Lufthansa's purchase of Air Berlin gives them an anti-competitive 95 percent share of the large German domestic market,” he said.
“We will add more aircraft to our UKP bases for S18 to take up any slack created by Monarch's collapse, and we continue to grow strongly in Italy where we are poised to be the main beneficiary of the inevitable contraction in Alitalia's short haul services.
“These trends, particularly where they allow high fare airlines like Lufthansa, BA and Air France to acquire local competitors, while constraining capacity and raising prices, can only be good for Ryanair's yield and traffic growth, as our fleet rises to 600 aircraft, and our traffic grows from 129m to 200m p.a. by 2024.”
O’Leary also discussed the recent re-appointment of former Malaysia Airlines CEO Peter Bellew, which was in part to ensure prevent the recurrence of the pilot rostering issues which led to mass cancellations this summer.
“The test of any management team, is the speed and effectiveness with which they respond to a crisis, and the pilot rostering failure in early September was just such a crisis,” he said.
“We have responded quickly to repair this failure, eliminate further cancellations and we are determined to invest the time, money and manpower to ensure that it never recurs.”
Read more:
Related Content
