British low-cost airline easyJet raised its full-year guidance when reporting strong growth in third-quarter revenue after it attracted more business travellers, sending its shares up 15%.
The Luton-based airline said today that revenues for the three months to the end of June grew 23% to £935m sterling, also boosted by growing passenger and ancillary revenues.
The budget carrier, which acted last year to lure more corporate passengers, said the number of business travellers flying with it jumped a fifth during the quarter, and the outlook was positive - it has already sold around three quarters of the seats for its summer flights.
Chief executive Carolyn McCall said that, assuming normal conditions and a 10-12% return on capital employed, it expected a full-year pretax profit of £200-230m, at current fuel and exchange rates.
EasyJet said it carried 14.4 million passengers in the June quarter, up 17.3%. Its load factor - a measure of how well it sells available seats - rose 0.2 percentage point to 86.3%. The airline had been expected to report a 2010/11 pretax profit of £184m, according to analysts.
Despite a recent rebound in economy class travel, rising fuel prices continue to cause trouble for the airline industry and could wipe out profitability in 2011, hindering the industry's recovery, industry body IATA has said. Fuel cost rises tend to weigh more on price-sensitive flights used by tourists and individual travellers.
EasyJet said it would look to forward buy up to 85% of its fuel requirements for the coming 12 months and around two thirds of its 12-24 month requirements.
The carrier said it had hedged three-quarters of its fuel requirements at $812 per metric tonne until its fiscal year-end.
Earlier this month easyJet's largest shareholder, Stelios Haji-Ioannou, said he wants to force a shareholder vote over the airline's plans to by new aircraft from Airbus, resuming a long-running dispute with the company he founded.
