ATW Daily News

SkyWest's third-quarter profit up 9.2%

Friday November 6, 2009

SkyWest Inc., parent of SkyWest Airlines and Atlantic Southeast Airlines, reported third-quarter net income of $28.6 million, a 9.2% increase from $26.2 million earned in the year-ago period. Quarterly revenue fell 31.7% to $637.7 million while expenses decreased 34.3% to $574.5 million, resulting in operating income of $63.3 million, up 5% from $60.3 million last year. It attributed the revenue drop to a $296.4 million decrease in fuel passthroughs as well as a transition to third-party customer service handling at several stations. It acquired three new CRJ700s and will take delivery of eight in the fourth quarter, with four to follow in the 2010 first quarter. At end of the third quarter its fleet consisted of 446 aircraft. Traffic increased 9% to 4.84 billion RPMs on a 5.6% rise in capacity to 5.95 billion ASMs, pushing load factor up 2.5 points to 81.3%. Yield declined 37.8% to 13 cents as RASM fell 35.5% to 10.7 cents and CASM decreased 37.1% to 10 cents. Block hr. were up 3.2%.

Regarding the marketing partnership with AirTran Airways announced this week, SkyWest Executive VP and CFO Brad Rich said, "We do feel that we have somewhat of a unique opportunity here to put the airplanes into a partnership with a very credible partner, credible code, in established markets." He continued, "In the event we're wrong, we do not have long-term agreements on these airplanes and we can make modifications as we need to."

Other headlines: