Finnair Loses €2M Per Day & 95% Capacity Cut April – June, 2020

Finnair today released its first-quarter report and a trading update on how Covid-19 is affecting its flight activity and financials.

Finnair loses €2M per day despite lowering expenses by 80% and plans to fly 5% of its usual capacity during the April – June quarter. The airline will have €500M share issuance (majority owner chips in), has access to €600M loan if needed, and can do sale/leasebacks with aircraft owned.

You can access Finnair here.

UPDATE: I ended up dialing into Finnair’s press conference (or webconference) and typed the following notes:

• Roughly 1,000 flights per month
• About 1,000 passengers per day
• 1M Euro daily burn rate (rest write-downs and deductions)
• Eight long-haul aircraft (A350s) doing cargo flights
• Two A330s may be converted to cargo-only for the time being
• May defer three A350 deliveries
• 300K refunds processed
• 144M Euro in cash refunds
• 15% takes the voucher

Here’s the Finnair’s presentation:

Download (PDF, 1.6MB)

Conclusion

It never ceases to amaze me how much these airlines will always end up losing from their fuel hedges. The cost of these to Finnair was during this quarter €54M

Finnair has not announced any layoffs as of today, unlike SAS 50% (read more here) and BA 27% (read more here). I guess that the announcement comes after the Finnish government chips in the €500M.

There is no doubt that Finnair survives this pandemic as its financials are solid, and the majority shareholder is the State of Finland.

The CEO clarified that Finland allows extended furloughs, where the government keeps paying most of the salary. The airline hopes that the traffic picks up quickly in order not to have to lay off employees permanently.