CAL records $121M before taxes and interest

TrinidadGuardian -The unau­dit­ed re­sults of Caribbean Air­lines Ltd for the nine months end­ing Sep­tem­ber 2019 showed earn­ings be­fore in­ter­est and tax­es of TT$121M, com­pris­ing of TT$153M on in­ter­na­tion­al op­er­a­tions.

How­ev­er, the air­line lost TT$32M on the do­mes­tic air-bridge.

Rev­enue for the pe­ri­od was TT$2.3B, up 3.8 per cent.

A state­ment is­sued by CAL at­trib­uted the im­ple­men­ta­tion of new tech­nol­o­gy, ex­pan­sion of the air­line’s route net­work, an in­crease in pas­sen­ger de­mand and car­go busi­ness to­geth­er with en­hanced cost man­age­ment as some of the el­e­ments which con­tributed to the air­line’s suc­cess over Jan­u­ary to Sep­tem­ber 2019.

Garvin Med­era, CAL’s Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer said, “It has tru­ly been a break­out year for Caribbean Air­lines.”

He added, “An­oth­er strong fi­nan­cial per­for­mance means we can con­tin­ue our in­vest­ments in­to new planes and ser­vices for our cus­tomers, build­ing a bet­ter place to work for our em­ploy­ees, and sup­port­ing com­mu­ni­ties across the Caribbean through spon­sor­ship, eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty and glob­al con­nec­tiv­i­ty.”

CAL not­ed that key fi­nan­cial high­lights for the pe­ri­od in­clud­ed in­creased car­go rev­enue by 14 per cent and year on year prof­it in­crease by 34 per cent.

Ad­di­tion of three new car­go in­ter­line part­ners—Alaskan Air­lines, Air Cana­da and Unit­ed Air­lines— giv­ing mar­ket ac­cess to 50 glob­al des­ti­na­tions, CAL said.

Oth­er fi­nan­cial high­lights in­clud­ed in­creased du­ty free rev­enue by 1.1 per cent and year on year prof­it in­crease by 36 per cent.

The air­line not­ed that it ranked 96 out of 332 glob­al air­lines for on-time per­for­mance (OTP).

The re­port read, “Do­mes­tic air bridge pro­vid­ed 872,498 seats and car­ried 766,776 pas­sen­gers, en­sur­ing that pas­sen­gers were ser­viced as re­quired with ad­e­quate ca­pac­i­ty. The OTP al­so av­er­aged 82 per cent with­in 15 min­utes on the air bridge for this pe­ri­od. In­ter­na­tion­al op­er­a­tions car­ried 1,247,592 pas­sen­gers, with an OTP av­er­age of 81 per cent.”