Over the past few weeks some major US airlines have reported their first quarter results, including American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines, and United Airlines. Alaska Airlines has become the latest US airline to announce first quarter earnings, and it's not pretty, as you'd expect. Alaska Airlines has announced a net loss of $232…
Continue reading: Alaska Airlines Reports $232 Million First Quarter Loss
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i think it would be useful when comparing losses to other carriers to also include market value and debt, as you cannot compare AS losses to UA DAL AA without considering its market size
Abey is correct in apples to apples, having said that AS is far and away a much better managed airline than AA/UA/DL with a solid loyal base of flyers. It will be interesting to see how not only Alaska but all the mainland carriers return to service, and routes they chose first. International travel is in the tank and will be for a long time, giving AS a better position hopefully.
Disclamer I am a AS MM and have been for sometime.
I think it's a bad sign that Alaska's loss is so much bigger than Southwest. Southwest is very likely a bigger operation and they are both mostly domestic airlines.
@ Daniel
Alaska is based on the West Coast. Washington, Oregon and California shut down earlier in March than a lot of the rest of the country.
@ eponymous coward
Probably that's part of it. But Southwest may also be running a tighter ship. Delta did far better than United and American as well, granted Delta may have a lot less flights to Europe on their metal. There's no doubt SFO traffic probably cooled down a fair bit faster than other places, so United and Alaska could have been hammered by that. Those in Seattle could also have stopped traveling earlier.
Probably a variety of factors at play here to explain the discrepancies 🙂 Maybe 2nd quarter results will be more revealing.
The most telling numbers right now are the cash burn figures... DL and AA appear to be around $70M a day while UA and WN are closer to $40-45M a day... not sure where AS is.
Read the post again.
"Alaska has reduced cash burn from $400 million per month in March, to $260 million per month in April, with the goal of reaching $200 million per month by June"
From all the quarterly numbers (per 8K not 10-Q), I would say the liquidity is stabilized (as in not much AS can do moving forward both raise or reduce).
I see that all US airlines are at risk but none are at the brink (weeks) of bankruptcy.
The most telling number for me now is actually future bookings. It could show how soon the market will recover. At current situation, some airline might not make it to 2021.
If I remember correctly, AS was one of the first carriers to swing back to profit after 9/11. As a smaller carrier, it’s easier to make changes - the big behemoths don’t have the same flexibility. Shorter lines of communication, fewer layers of bureaucracy and employees being closer to the market all help. I’ve seen the same in other industries - GM, Ford and Caterpillar for instance. They are so large and disorganised with plenty of internal politics which leaves them more vulnerable when markets change despite their usually deeper pockets. Back when GM owned Saab, the latter was unable to get new models cleared by GM centrally, and as a result Saab was eventually shut down. If they had been allowed to act more independently I’m sure they would still be around.
Turned out that selling Virgin to Alaska was a very shrewd and well-timed piece of business for Branson.
I think Alaska having a higher percentage of leisure passengers is a disadvantage, as I expect leisure travel to rebound slower than business travel, and also has smaller margins. But, it looks like for now they are safe from running out of cash, during 2020 at least.