Jet Airways, India?s largest passenger carrier, said on Thursday its standalone net loss for the March 2012 quarter more than doubled from the year-ago period as it paid more for fuel and suffered from a depreciating rupee. Net loss for the quarter was R298.12 crore against R124.46 crore in the same quarter last year. The company did not provide consolidated numbers for the quarter.
Fuel costs rose 42.4% during the quarter to R1,822.46 crore. The Naresh Goyal-promoted airline had to operate flights at nearly 92% capacity to break-even because of the high fuel costs, but it could only achieve 83%. Standalone revenues for the airline increased 24.6% to R4,041 crore during the quarter against R3,243 crore in the same quarter last year.
?Rupee depreciation and fuel prices have impacted the quarterly results. However, capacity reduction in the industry has helped raise fares and improve yields,? said Nikos Kardassis, CEO of Jet Airways. ?Full impact of the increase in fares would be seen in the first quarter of the 2013 fiscal.?
Analysts say that loss is more than expected despite a healthy increase in revenue. ?Revenue has gone up better than we had expected, so that shows there has been some impact of fares,? said Mahantesh Sabarad, senior vice-president of equity research at Fortune Equity Brokers. ?Things have been improving ever since Kingfisher Airlines shut down their Red service in October. But fuel costs have been a dampener.?
The cost for providing each seat or cost per available seat kilometre grew 14.4% y-o-y to R3.58 while revenue from each seat or revenue per kilometre grew 9.6% y-o-y to R3.92.
The airline?s subsidiary JetLite, which operates under the JetKonnect brand, narrowed its losses during the March quarter to R56.4 crore, nearly 25% lower y-o-y.
?We believe the JetKonnect rebranding initiative will help us enhance revenues,? the airline said in a statement. ?Other initiatives such as enhancing ancillary revenues, discontinuing loss making routes and sale of aircraft will help us in the medium to long term.? The airline also said that it is deploying more aircraft on the profit making regions like West Asia and South East Asia even as it discontinues loss making routes.
With 183 expat pilots on its rolls who get paid in dollars, Jet Airways felt the pinch of depreciating rupee in its employee costs as well. Employee costs went up 8% to R410.74 crore.
The airline?s consolidated net loss for the 2012 fiscal widened by more than 15 times to R1,420.13 crore for the 2012 fiscal. Consolidated net revenue for the fiscal increased by 15% y-o-y to R16,703 crore.
