Emirates Airline‘s first half profits have been hammered by record jet fuel prices, falling by 88 per cent to US$77 million. The airline, which flies four times daily from New Zealand, said profit for the six months to September 30 last year was US$643 million.

The Dubai-based carrier’s fuel bill doubled to US$2.51 billion during the period, about US$463 million more than the carrier planned. Operating revenue jumped by 31 per cent to US$6 billion, the company said. Chairman and chief executive Sheik Ahmed bin Saeed al-Maktoum said the airline was in a strong position to weather the global economic meltdown.

“The first half of the year has been very tough for the airline industry, with record fuel prices forcing many carriers to shut shop or consolidate,” he said. He said provided there was no further fallout from the financial chaos the airline was anticipating a “robust” second half of the year. The 23-year-old airline is one of the fastest growing in the world and in Australia last week said its plans were not changing.

East Asia and Australasia commercial operations senior vice-president Richard Vaughan said demand was softening in some markets but the outlook for Australia was positive and the airline’s new services were on track.

This included in February the start of an A380 superjumbo Dubai-Sydney-Auckland, a non-stop Brisbane-Dubai Airbus A340-500 service, and a non-stop A340-500 Melbourne-Dubai flight, he told the Australian. Crude oil prices averaged US$122 per barrel for the first six months of the financial year, up from an average of US$67 for the same period last year, while the differential between crude and aviation fuel was also up from an average of US$16 per barrel to US$28.

In the first half of its current financial year, passenger traffic was up 11 per cent, cargo tonnes up 13 per cent, and passenger yield increased by 20 per cent. But the airline’s planes flew less full: occupancy dipped to 78.3 per cent from 79.7 per cent in the first half of 2007. Emirates’ cash position on September 30 was US$2.3 billion, compared with US$3.4 billion six months earlier.

This was after paying dividends to the Government – its only shareholder – relating to the previous financial year, as well as funding pre-delivery payments for future aircraft deliveries and the upgrade programme for some of its aircraft fleet.

Since April 2008, Emirates has launched passenger services to three new destinations Kozhikode (Calicut), Guangzhou and Los Angeles, bringing its global network to 100 cities on six continents.

Trans-Pacific services are a possibility but Vaughan said last week Emirates had no immediate plan to exercise rights to fly between Los Angeles and Auckland and link up with transtasman flights from Australia. Emirates’ current fleet size is 121 aircraft. Since the beginning of the current financial year, it took delivery of eight new wide body aircraft including two Airbus A380s.

source: www.nzherald.co.nz