JetBlue TrueBlue - JetBlue Q2 Profit Soars - Quick Facts

http://www.nasdaq.com/article/jetblue-q2-profit-soars---quick-facts-20120725-00406
(RTTNews.com) - JetBlue Airways Corp. (JBLU) posted significantly higher second-quarter net income of $52 million, or $0.16 per share, versus $25 million, or $0.08 per share in the earlier year quarter. On average, 17 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected earnings per share of $0.16 for the quarter. Analysts' estimates typically exclude one-time items.

Total operating revenues amounted to $1.28 billion, a 11.0% increase from $1.15 billion in the previous year. Analysts estimated revenues of $1.29 billion for the quarter. Revenue passenger miles for the second quarter grew 10.5% to 8.50 billion on a capacity rise of 5.5%, resulting in a second quarter load factor of 85.3%, a growth of 3.8 points year-over-year.

Dave Barger, JetBlue's President and Chief Executive commented, "Our focused growth strategy in Boston and the Caribbean & Latin America is clearly paying off as we generated record revenues and improved operating margins."

Moving ahead, capacity is expected to grow between 7.0% and 9.0% in the third quarter and to increase between 6.5% and 8.5% for the full year.

Attracting more business customers is driving this increase, fuel coming down is also helping. Analysts are going to key on the maintenance costs, but every airline has maintainance costs - big deal nothing to see here. B6 just has to manage this going forward, maybe sell a few older frames as new ones come on, especially with the A320 sharklets, NEO, and A321's coming.


Nice quarter!

Unfortunately, the higher PRASM was almost entirely due to higher load factors and not because B6 was able to increase fares, as yield was up by just one percent year over year. As each year goes by, the B6 workforce will get more expensive and fares need to increase.

Some good news was the decrease in total debt by $243 million - B6 has had very high debt, and it's good to see Barger work on reducing that debtload.

Agree on reducing debt, one analyst on the call seemed to challenge Powers on the ROIC calculation. IMHO, paying cash for new aircraft, paying down debt, and increasing cash balances are all positives - shame the stock price won't budge though.......