Ryanair reports 197-mln-euro loss in H1 of fiscal year 2021
Source: Xinhua | 2020-11-03
Europe's largest low-cost airline Ryanair said on Monday that it suffered a net loss of 197 million euros (about 229 million U.S. dollars) in the first half of the fiscal year 2021 (H1 of FY2021) compared with a net profit of 1.15 billion euros it earned in the same period of the previous fiscal year.
"COVID-19 grounded the Group's entire fleet from mid-March to the end of June as EU (European Union) governments imposed flight or travel bans and widespread population lockdowns," the airline said in a report posted on its website.
During the April-September period of this year, Ryanair carried a total of 17.1 million passengers, down 80 percent from the same period of last year, according to the report.
In a video speech simultaneously posted online with the report, Ryanair's chief executive officer Michael O'Leary said that he expected more loss in H2 than in H1 and the number of passengers to be handled by Ryanair for the entire fiscal year will be around 38 million.
Headquartered in Ireland, Ryanair is an airline which mainly operates short-haul flights in Europe with a fleet of over 470 aircraft and a workforce of more than 16,000 people. The annual number of passengers handled by the airline prior to the COVID-19 crisis is about 150 million, according to the statistics provided by Ryanair in its Monday report.
Ryanair said in the report that FY2021 will continue to be "a hugely challenging year" for it as it believes that effective vaccines will not emerge until early 2021.
According to the World Health Organization, there are now around 200 COVID-19 candidate vaccines being developed by countries including France, Italy, China, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States and at least 44 of these vaccines are in clinical trials. (1 euro = 1.163 U.S. dollars)
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