Copa Holdings, S.A. (NYSE:CPA) continues to be a star in the airline industry, riding a wave of growth in Latin America. The company is growing revenue and earnings at double-digit rates and has even more aircraft entering the fleet later this year.
Here’s a look at the key highlights from the first-quarter 2018 earnings report.
What happened with Copa Holdings, S.A. this quarter?
Airlines have a lot of factors affecting both revenue and costs, so sometimes revenue and net income don’t tell the whole story. Copa Holdings breaks these factors down in its earnings report, and I’ve gathered the important operating highlights below.
Revenue passenger miles (RPMs) were up 10.4% to 5.22 billion on an 8.4% increase in available seat miles (ASMs) to 6.3 billion. As a result, load factor increased 150 basis points to 83%.
On the pricing side, revenue per average seat mile was up 7.2% to 11.4 cents and cost per average seat mile excluding fuel was only up 1.1% to 6.3 cents.
Fuel costs did rise 17.6% to $2.16 per gallon and the number of gallons consumed jumped 8% to 80.1 million due to the larger number of flights. The price of oil has been rising in recent months, so this is a cost we can expect will increase in the future.
Maybe most impressively, the average aircraft utilization per day was up from 11.3 hours a year ago to 12 hours. The more hours a company can use an aircraft per day, the more revenue they can generate from their most expensive piece of equipment. ..
