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Airline shares tumble as global IT issues continue and Ryanair reveals 46% fall in profits – business live

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Airline shares tumble as global IT issues continue and Ryanair reveals 46% fall in profits – business live

Key events

Mark Sweney

Full story: Ryanair has said its profits plunged by almost half between April and June and warned that fares this summer would be “materially lower” than last year.

Europe’s largest airline reported profits of €360m (£303m) in the spring quarter, 46% lower than the same period last year, despite passenger numbers rising 10% to 55.5 million.

The downbeat results, which missed analysts’ estimates, drove the budget carrier’s share price down 12.5% in early trading on Monday.

The news also affected other publicly traded airline stocks. EasyJet fell 7.5%, Wizz Air was down 6.3% and IAG, the owner of British Airways and Iberia, slipped 3.3%.

The average cost of a fare dropped from €49.07 to €41.93 year on year, but the increase in passenger numbers helped limit the decline in total revenues to 1% at €363bn.

Ryanair said while it expected strong demand this summer, with passenger numbers likely to be up 8% overall this financial year, “pricing remains softer than we expected”:

We now expect second-quarter fares [July to September] to be materially lower than last summer…The final first-half outcome is, however, totally dependent on close-in bookings and yields in August and September.

“Close-in bookings” refer to customers waiting much longer than usual to book summer flights.

Read more:

British online supermarket group Ocado is getting a boost, and is one of the biggest risers on the FTSE 250.

Shoppers are seen in a Kroger supermarket on October 14, 2022, in Atlanta, Georgia. – Photograph: Elijah Nouvelage/AFP/Getty Images

Shares were bolstered after US grocer Kroger placed an order for a wide range of new automated technologies to roll out in warehouses across its network.

While the company did not put a value on the Kroger order, it said it would be using the tech in both current and future warehouses, suggesting a boost to future revenues.

It comes a week after Ocado raised its annual guidance for its technology arm. The company said it expects its tech division to achieve a “mid-teens” Ebitda (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) margin this year, up from previous guidance of more than 10%.

CEO Tim Steiner said last week that the global shift to online shopping had resumed, after a brief post-pandemic pause: “We expect to see a lot of long-term growth.”

A view of those Ryanair shares, which are getting hammered after the airline’s earnings results:

Ryanair shares fell at the start of trading Photograph: Refinitiv

Matt Britzman, a senior equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown says there will be knock-on effects to the wider sector, as investors speculate whether rivals are feeling similar pressures:

Ryanair disappoints as the outlook over the key summer period looks weak

First quarter profit after tax of €360mn was well below what markets expected as ticket prices plummeted.

The outlook was poor, too, with Ryanair expecting lower prices as peak summer travel kicks in.

There will be knock-on effects to the wider sector from this, though it’s a little unclear whether the likes of easyJet are facing issues at quite this scale.

Ryanair shares tumble 12.5% at start of trading

Disappointing Ryanair profits – and its warnings over depressed summer airfares – has knocked back its shares 12.5% at the start of trading.

A Ryanair Boeing 737 MAX 8-200 Aircraft. Photograph: Stéphane Mahé/Reuters

The airline’s disappointing update has also managed to drag down rivals, including British Airways owners IAG, which is one of the biggest fallers on the FTSE 100 index, down 3.3% .

But even worse-hit is EasyJet which is down more than 7% and is now at the bottom of the bluechip index.

EasyJet shares tumble. Photograph: Refinitiv
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Introduction: CrowdStrike still working to restore services after IT meltdown

Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of business, the financial markets and the world economy.

The world is still recovering from the global IT outage caused by a faulty security update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike last week, which hit hospitals, businesses, banks and airline services around the world.

In LinkedIn post overnight, CrowdStrike said it was continuing to “focus on restoring all systems as soon as possible,” and that it had deployed a “new technique” to try get everyone back online.:

CrowdStrike continues to focus on restoring all systems as soon as possible. Of the approximately 8.5 million Windows devices that were impacted, a significant number are back online and operational.

Together with customers, we tested a new technique to accelerate impacted system remediation. We’re in the process of operationalizing an opt-in to this technique. We’re making progress by the minute.

While the company has again apologised for the disruption, full restoration could take weeks. And that may result in further pain for CrowdStrike’s US-listed shares, which have so far plunged 11%.

Meanwhile, Ryanair has suffered a 46% drop in its first quarter profits, covering the three months to June, after the airline was hit by cost-conscious travellers.

Average passenger fares fell 15% in the quarter, compared to a year earlier, with CEO Michael O’Leary explaining that they had to take part in “more price stimulation than we had previously expected – meaning the the airline had to cut prices to bolster demand.”

He said the airline had recently tried to close off some cheap seats but they were met with resistance, and opened up lower-cost seats again, as a result.

O’Leary warned that there was likely to be more pain the second quarter:

While Q2 demand is strong, pricing remains softer than we expected, and we now expect Q2 fares to be materially lower than last summer.

The agenda

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