Ryanair profits soar

When the airline was founded by Tony Ryan in 1985, its entire schedule was comprised of one daily flight from a small airfield in County Waterford. The results announced on Tuesday showed a net profit of EURO268.9m ($331.0m) for the 12 months ending on 31 March.
Ryanair’s flamboyant chief executive Michael O’Leary said that he expected the number of passengers carried by Ryanair each month to surpass the equivalent figure for British Airways by the end of this summer. O’Leary also predicted that Ryanair could be the biggest airline in Europe by 2012.
The results showed Ryanair’s passenger numbers up to 27.6 million for 2004-05, a 19 percent increase on the previous twelve months. The airline’s profits also showed a 19 percent growth. This came despite a 25 percent rise in the company’s operating costs, an increase that was attributed to rising fuel prices.
O’Leary was in characteristically ebullient form at the results’ announcement:
“Our robust trading performance over the past 12 months, despite intense competition and significantly higher oil prices, reaffirms the unique strength of Ryanair’s lowest cost model in Europe,” he said.
Taking his customary jibes at competitors, O’Leary drew attention to the fuel surcharges some other airlines had imposed because of the rising price of oil. O’Leary said that the charges imposed by flag-carrying airlines had “further widened the gap between their high fares and our low fares.”
The Ryanair boss also noted that his airline had recently introduced five new routes from London, four of which go to Poland and one to Slovakia. He said that he anticipated announcing more new routes for the winter season, but he gave no indication of the likely destinations.
O’Leary is well known in Ireland for his combative style, especially towards politicians. There is no sign of that changing judging by Tuesday’s performance. The CEO embarked upon a rhetorical offensive against both the Irish government and the British Airports Authority (BAA) for their handling of developments at Dublin and London Stansted airports respectively.
“The situation at Dublin Airport has descended into a farce,” he complained. “The Dublin Airport Authority, which is responsible for this third world facility, is to be rewarded for its incompetence by being allowed to build the second terminal.”
Defenders of the government’s approach claim that the idea, favored by O’Leary, of having two or more competing terminals within one airport has had an unimpressive track record everywhere else it has been tried.
But O’Leary also turned his fire directly on Bertie Ahern. He said:
“The Taoiseach recently demonstrated how hopelessly out of touch he is by claiming that the present overcrowded terminal has the capacity for 6 million more passengers per annum. It would appear that there aren’t any queues at the VIP escort to the government jet.”
In railing against BAA, O’Leary alleged that its “monopoly” on running British airports had resulted in “the truly bizarre proposal” that approximately $7.3bn be spent on new facilities at London’s Stansted Airport – facilities that, according to O’Leary, the airlines based at Stansted “unanimously oppose”.
If all that were not colorful enough, O’Leary also insisted that Ryanair was well on its way to emulating world leaders in other businesses:
“Like Wal-mart, Tesco and Dell in their respective markets, Ryanair’s low fares cannot be matched nor beaten by any of our competitors,” he proclaimed.