Qantas posts whopping $1.74b profit, announces employee bonuses

The Qantas Group has posted its first full year statutory profit since FY19 with an underlying profit before tax of $2.47 billion.

The Group reported a statutory after tax profit of $1.74 billion. This compares with $7 billion in accumulated statutory losses over three prior years.

With this profit, the Group announced that it will reward its employees with around $340m that has been set aside in bonuses for more than 21,000 people. This was originally flagged in September 2021 in response to the challenges and hardship employees faced in dealing with the COVID crisis and to incentivise the turnaround.

Underpinning the profit was completion of the Group’s $1 billion recovery program (launched in the first year of those losses), a 132 per cent increase in flying compared with FY22 and strong travel demand driving higher revenue.

The airline said that operational performance improved considerably during the year after a challenging ramp up, with Qantas achieving the best on-time performance of the major domestic airlines for 11 months out of 12 and Jetstar returning to pre-COVID levels.

Qantas Group CEO Alan Joyce said: “These results show a substantial turnaround in both our finances and service over the past year.

“Flight delays and cancellations have largely returned to pre-COVID levels and we’ve shifted from heavy losses to a strong profit and pipeline of investment worth billions of dollars.

“We safely flew almost 70 billion more seat kilometres and doubled the number of people we carried to 46 million compared to the year before. Travel demand is incredibly robust and we’ve taken delivery of more aircraft and opened up new routes to help meet it.”

Customer satisfaction, while not back to pre-COVID levels, has also improved in line with operational performance.

Normalising of international capacity and the unwinding of inefficiencies from the return to flying will help put downward pressure on fares and strengthen financial performance.

This strength enables the Group to keep investing heavily in customer experience, including firm orders for a further 24 Boeing and Airbus widebody aircraft from FY27 onwards to replace Qantas’ A330 fleet, plus purchase right options for future renewal and growth.

On Monday, Qantas announced another increase to its international capacity with an additional 250,000 seats for New York, Los Angeles, Johannesburg and Bali.

The Qantas Group is currently at around 80 per cent of its pre-COVID international capacity levels, which has almost doubled in the past year. This is expected to reach 100 per cent by March 2024, with this additional flying taking it beyond that level from July 2024 onwards.

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