Royal Jordanian (RJ) has posted a net profit of JD31.8 million ($44.7) for the third quarter of the year, up 146 per cent compared to JD12.9 million ($18.1 million) attained in the same period last year.

At a press conference held on October 31 at Fairmont Hotel, Amman, RJ president/CEO Stefan Pichler expressed confidence that a significantly improved commercial performance helped RJ to achieve a turnaround in the financial results in the third quarter of this year and praised the team spirit of the management team to make this happen.

He said that the number of passengers the airline transported in the third quarter rose by 5 per cent over last year, with RJ aircraft carrying 955,000 passengers this year while in the corresponding months of 2016 it carried 913,000 passengers.

The seat load factor went up from 73 per cent in the third quarter of last year to 75 per cent this year, a 3 per cent increase.

Pichler said: “One of the key historic weaknesses of our airline was the lack of commercial expertise and experience. We changed our pricing strategy and stimulated the markets with affordable fares, we enhanced the sales performance, we managed our capacity tightly and did the first steps to streamline the product. Now we can see growing travel demand. Our successful sales campaigns resulted in an increase in the revenues in the third quarter of 2017, which reached JD202 million, marking an 8 per cent increase over the JD187 million made over the same period last year. We were also able to control the operational expenses in this period, which registered a 3 per cent decline: JD148 million in 2017, against JD152.3 million spent in 2016.”

Pichler said that RJ attained a net income of JD5.4 million ($7.5 million) in the first nine months of 2017, against a net loss of JD2.7 million ($3.7 million) incurred in the same period last year, marking a 300 per cent improvement.

“After a very bad start into the first 5 months of this year we were able to break even in June and then reversed our fortunes month by month,” added Pichler.

The number of passengers in this period went up by 5 per cent, from 2,350,000 passengers that traveled on RJ between January and September 2016 to 2,463,000 passengers in the same period of 2017.
 
The seat load factor in the first three quarters increased from 67 per cent to 71 per cent, a 6 per cent growth, and the uplifted cargo grew by 5 per cent over the comparison period of last year.
Pichler added that RJ revenues in the January-September period of 2017 amounted to JD487 million ($684.6 million), against JD474 million ($666.4 million) for the corresponding period in 2016 (up 27 per cent).

Pichler gave the outlook as follows: “We are now making the first steps to transform Royal Jordanian in a successful company and I am quite confident that we will be able to achieve a slight operating profit for 2017. There is a lot of work ahead of us, the company needs fundamental restructuring and we have further potentials to cut down cost and enhance revenues. We have a full agenda ahead of us!” - TradeArabia News Service