Southwest Needs ‘Substantial’ Demand Recovery to End Cash Burn in 2021


[ad_1]

Southwest Airlines hopes to reach a breakeven point by the end of the year, but that will require a “substantial rebound” in revenue including a recovery in business travel, executives said in an earnings call on Thursday.

In the fourth quarter, Southwest’s revenue was down 68.7 percent year over year to $1.7 billion, and total revenues were down 64.9 percent to $2 billion. Daily cash burn in the quarter was about $12 million. In order to break even, revenue would need to recover to a level between 60 percent and 70 percent of what it was in 2019, which would require them to about double from what they are now, Southwest chairman and CEO Gary Kelly said.

For now, booking trends “do not indicate significant improvement through March 2021,” according to Kelly. Southwest’s corporate managed travel demand in the fourth quarter was “very weak,” down 87 percent year over year—which actually was a slight improvement over the third quarter—and Southwest expects business travel levels still will be down between 50 percent and 60 percent by the end of the year, Southwest president Tom Nealon said.

Even with lower levels of business travel, however, Southwest expects to improve share both with new available markets and its new relationships with global distribution systems. Southwest went live with full participation agreements Amadeus as well as Travelport’s Apollo, Worldspan and Galileo GDS last year, and at the end of last year, it announced it had reached a similar agreement with Sabre. Southwest expects to go live in Sabre sometime in the second half of the year, which should “coincide with the return of business travel,” Nealon said.

In a research note naming Southwest a “top pick,” Cowen analysts concurred that growing corporate travel share likely would add to Southwest’s revenue stream, given its investment in projects like GDS participation. In 2019, Southwest had “underperformed” in its share of corporate travel compared with its total U.S. market share of about 22 percent, but Southwest is poised to “take their fair share of corporate travel,” according to the note.

Southwest also plans to return its Boeing Max 737 aircraft to service on March 11. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration rescinded its grounding order for the Max in November, and Southwest since then has been working to implement new pilot training requirements, flight control software updates and other FAA requirements to resume service on the aircraft type, Kelly said.

Southwest reported a net loss of $908 million for the fourth quarter, compared with a net income of $514 million in the fourth quarter of 2019. For the full year, Southwest reported a net loss of $3.1 billion.

RELATED: Southwest Q3 earnings

[ad_2]


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *