An Airbus A380-800 passenger plane of the Emirates Airlines at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport.
Mikhail Tereshchenko | TASS | Getty Images
DUBAI — Emirates airline reported a massive comeback in its half-year earnings Thursday with a 282% jump in profits to 862 million dirhams ($235 million), thanks in part to lower fuel prices.
The head-turning figure comes off the back of the airline’s weakest full-year profit in a decade, a 69% drop in net profit for the year up to March 2019.
The Dubai-based carrier’s numbers were also boosted by an improved seat load factor — the measure of how efficiently a carrier fills seats and generates fare revenue — of 81.1%, with 29.6 million passengers carried, a 2.3 percentage point increase on the same period a year ago.
The airline carried 7.9% more passengers to Dubai compared to a year ago, an Emirates Group press release said Thursday. Revenue for 2019-2020 half year performance was down 3% to 47.3 billion dirhams.
Emirates Group, which includes the airline and other bodies like airports services provider Dnata, saw profit up 8% at 1.2 billion dirhams. Revenue was down 2% to 53.3 billion dirhams, which the group says is due to adverse factors including the September bankruptcy of British charter airline Thomas Cook, the Dubai International Airport runway closure, and “unfavorable currency movements.”