Auckland Airport's profit has had a heavy landing as the pandemic savaged much of its business.
An Air New Zealand plane. Photo: James Coleman/ Unsplash
Chief executive Adrian Littlewood said the 2021 financial year had been a year like no other, with the lowest number of international arrivals and departures since 1972.
"Covid-19 changed our business overnight bringing constant upheaval to almost every part of our operation," he said.
- Reported profit after tax was up 139.4 percent to $464.2 million
- Underlying profit fell by $230.3 million to a loss of $41.8 million
- Revenue was down 50.4 percent to $281.1 million
- No final dividend will be paid
- Total number of passengers decreased to 6.4 million, down 58.5 percent on the previous financial year.
The company will give each permanent employee $1500 in shares as an acknowledgement of their work over the period and the role they will play as aviation recovers.
Recovery strategy
Auckland Airport planned to strengthen its retail shopping offerings with the development of a 23,000m/sq outlet centre, which was expected to create more than 500 new jobs across more than 100 stores and food outlets.
Littlewood said Auckland Airport had gone further to control costs and reset the business in the 2021 financial year to ensure it reflected the new operating environment, including scaling back operations and repaying debt to reduce interest costs.
He said the company had adopted more conservative planning assumptions than those of the International Air Travel Association (IATA), which was forecasting global travel to fully recover and exceed pre-pandemic levels in 2023.
"There are encouraging signs with vaccination programmes now ramping up here and around the world but we expect to see further volatility in domestic and international travel in the short term, with the global aviation market gradually rebuilding in 2022."
Due to uncertainty in the market, Littlewood said Auckland Airport was currently unable to provide underlying earnings guidance for the 2022 financial year.
However, he said capital works would continue with investment expected to be between $250 million and $300 million in the 2022 financial year.
