RYANAIR has toasted its pandemic recovery with a doubling of sales — on the back of higher fares and a travel revival.
The Dublin-based budget airline said total sales in the year to March 31 rose by 124 per cent to £9.4billion.
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Ryanair flew 168.6million passengers, three-quarters more than the 97million it carried last year.
As a result, it swung to a pre-tax profit of £1.25 billion, compared to a loss of £308million the previous year.
The flyer, once famed for its 99p flights, has hiked fares by 50 per cent to an average of £31.05 in the past year — with fares still ten per cent higher than pre-Covid.
Ryanair’s accounts also revealed it’s now making just under £20 per customer for “discretionary services” such as priority boarding and reserved seating.
Boss Michael O’Leary said that despite the higher fares it would still “wipe the floor” with its rivals — claiming they had made “irrationally exuberant” fare hikes.
He insisted: “Other airlines have lifted theirs much higher.”
But he warned prices were likely to rise further due to higher staff costs.
Ryanair’s chief is the latest travel boss to celebrate a bounce-back after Covid.
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He credited the surge in bookings to people “spending a long time being locked up and now wanting to get out”.
The firm is also enjoying the return of more business travellers, particularly to European cities such as Dublin, he added.
Mr O’Leary, Ryanair’s frontman for almost three decades, recently renewed his contract until 2028 but he said the airline had stepped up succession planning.
He said: “The business is no longer heavily dependent on me.”
WILKO REVAMP
WILKO has hired advisers at PwC to explore a company restructuring that could shut some stores.
The struggling homeware chain, which has 400 shops, is considering a form of insolvency that often sees retailers push landlords into rent cuts and store closures in order for the rest of the business to survive. Boss
Mark Jackson said: “We’re in the early stages of the turnaround and, as is usual, the directors continue to explore all options.”
In February, Wilko cut 400 jobs. It shut 15 shops last year.
CHINESE BAN FOR U.S. CHIPS
CHINA has escalated its tech war with the US by banning memory chip maker Micron on national security grounds.
The country’s Cyberspace Administration said Micron products posed “serious network security risks” and would be barred from nationally important firms — a move that could stop the firm selling to the telecom, transport and finance sectors.
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China accounted for around 10 per cent of Micron’s sales last year, worth £2.6billion.
The block comes just a day after US president Joe Biden said relations with China would improve “very shortly”.
At the start of the year, the US restricted exports to Huawei.
BANK SELL-BACK
THE Government has sold £1.26billion of shares in NATWEST back to the bank, taking taxpayers’ stake below 40 per cent for the first time.
The bank said the sale cut taxpayers’ holding from 41.4 per cent to 38.6 per cent.
Boss Dame Alison Rose said the transaction “demonstrates positive progress on the bank’s strategic priorities and the path to privatisation”.
Following its £45.5billion bailout of RBS in the credit crunch, the Government owned as much as 84 per cent of NatWest.
M&S BABY PLAN
MARKS & SPENCER is offering parents of premature babies up to 12 weeks’ paid leave if they require neonatal care.
The retailer introduced the staff policy after one of its food managers gave birth to a premature baby boy who weighed just 1.7lb — and then spent six months of her maternity leave in hospital.
Sarah Findlater, group HR director, said: “We hope this will allow colleagues to focus on their baby, without having to worry about pay or using up maternity, paternity or adoption leave.”
META HIT FOR £1BN
FACEBOOK owner Meta has been hit with a record £1billion fine by European regulators.
It is the largest fine imposed under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation laws.
Meta has also been be given five months to stop transferring users’ data to the US without sufficient safeguards.
Irish data protection chiefs said Meta had transferred European Facebook users to the US without protecting them from intelligence surveillance.
Meta’s global affairs boss, Nick Clegg, called the decision “flawed and unjustified”.
LLOYDS’ ECO JOB
FRUSTRATED tree-huggers can still have a career in the City after Lloyds Banking Group appointed its first ever “group head of nature”.
It has hired Dr Katie Leach to help “ensure nature is embedded in decision making across the group”. The bank already has a head of environmental sustainability but it said Dr Leach would help it tackle climate change.
In February, Lloyds took part in a UN Nature COP15 meeting to help scale and finance projects that “help benefit people and nature”.
