Recently, the annual reports for 2023 and the first quarter of 2024 of Chinese listed airlines have all been released. According to the disclosure of the 2023 annual reports, among the seven A-share listed airlines, four of them reported losses, and when looking at the net profit after deducting non-recurring items, a total of five airlines were in the red.
By April 29th, China Southern Airlines, China Eastern Airlines, Air China, Hainan Airlines Holding, Spring Airlines, Lucky Air, and Xiamen Airlines have successively disclosed their performance announcements. In the first quarter of this year, the combined net profit of the seven major airlines was only 172 million yuan.
As shown in the first quarter report of China Eastern Airlines, the net profit attributable to the parent company in the first quarter of this year was a loss of 803 million yuan, with a non-recurring net loss of 971 million yuan. The basic earnings per share of China Eastern Airlines during the reporting period was -0.04 yuan.
In the first quarter of this year, China Eastern Airlines’ net cash flow from operating activities was 4.738 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 29.36%; net cash flow from financing activities was -8.075 billion yuan, a decrease of 5.425 billion yuan compared to the same period last year; net cash flow from investment activities was -3.674 billion yuan, which was -1.725 billion yuan in the same period last year.
The first quarter report of Air China shows that the net profit attributable to the parent company in the first quarter of this year was a loss of 1.674 billion yuan.
In March of this year, Air China, China Eastern Airlines, and China Southern Airlines successively disclosed their 2023 financial reports, showing that the total losses of the three major state-owned airlines last year exceeded 13.4 billion yuan. Among them, Air China had the smallest loss, about 1.046 billion yuan, but had the largest loss in 2022, around 38.619 billion yuan. The three major airlines collectively reported losses of around 108.6 billion yuan in 2022.
According to information released by the Civil Aviation Administration of China, in 2023, the overall loss of Chinese airlines was around 17.1 billion yuan.
It is worth noting that despite the continuous losses in the Chinese civil aviation industry in recent years, the three major airlines are still continuing to purchase a large number of new aircraft.
During the height of the COVID-19 lockdowns in China in 2022, the three major airlines announced plans to spend billions of dollars to order aircraft from Airbus; since last year, China Eastern Airlines and Air China have also spent over a hundred billion US dollars each to order domestically produced C919 mainline aircraft.