Wizz Air has revealed its annual profits slumped after taking a £43.1 million hit in light of the Iran war. The budget airline said it could not provide an outlook for the year ahead, partly due to volatility from the conflict and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
It reported an operating profit of £120.6 million for the year to the end of March, down 16.6% on the year before. The company’s net profit was almost entirely wiped out, from £184.6 million to £1.1 million year on year. Wizz Air said it faced a number of one-off costs during the year, including maintenance and repairs from the phase-out of an older fleet and the delivery of new aircraft, and crew costs jumped by 16%.
Like other airlines, it also had to cancel flights after the war in Iran broke out in February. Cancelling flights to Tel Aviv, the Middle East, and Cyprus in March impacted its earnings by an estimated £43.1 million, it said.
Despite this, Wizz Air still flew a record 69.7 million passengers in the year to the end of March, one tenth more than the year before. Revenues from airfares increased by 8.4% year on year to £2.73 billion.
The company’s load factor, a key industry measure of how well it fills its planes, dipped by 0.5 percentage points to 90.7%, largely due to the aftermath of the Iran war.
Jozsef Varadi, Wizz Air’s chief executive, said: “We have continued to grow and serve an increasing number of customers.
“Equally, the defining feature of the year was the set of strategic decisions we made to position the business for long-term resilience and competitiveness.
“This has proven to be the right direction, working well in a balanced environment as well as at times of volatility, which the industry experienced towards the end of the financial year due to the Middle East crisis.”
