What do you want me to talk about? Well, maybe I would just take it from the, and hopefully the slide is going to move at one point. With regard to the performance of fiscal 2023, capacity grew by 76% year-on-year, and this is 40% up versus pre-pandemic levels. You recall, we made a number of investment decisions into growth, London Gatwick slot acquisitions, the opening of Wizz Air Abu Dhabi, and the expansion in Italy are probably the most important investments we have made. Obviously, you see that through the capacity numbers. Passenger traffic reached over 51 million passengers.
Just to put that in perspective, this is now a bigger number than Lufthansa's passenger numbers. We carried more passengers than Lufthansa. Of course, we carried more than British Airways and Air France. That kind of puts us into a different spotlight when it comes to the European airline industry. Revenue was up 134% year-on-year and 41% versus fiscal 20. As the revenue remained a cornerstone of the revenue production of the airline, it reached EUR 37 per passenger in the financial year. We made progress on unit cost reduction, but this is a transitionary process, of course. But CASK, cost per available seat kilometer, came down by 8% versus previous financial year.
EBITDA ended up at EUR 134 million, that translated into EUR 535 million of net loss. You know, it was a difficult year for Wizz Air, especially the first half of the financial year was very difficult. I mean, we basically observed most of the losses in that period. Just to remind you, that was the period when the war in Ukraine broke out and significantly affected our network. We had to reshuffle a significant portion, roughly around 11% of our capacity, from Ukraine and Russia to other new markets, creating capacity gaps and creating revenue immaturity gaps.
Also, we had to go through the summer, which became very problematic for the whole industry due to all sorts of external factors. Against those external shocks, we were not resilient enough to properly operate the airline, and that incurred significant distress and significant financial burden on the company. We already started seeing a lot of improvements going through the second half of the financial year based upon the investments what we put into operational resilience. We actually put in a lot of measures, invested well over EUR 100 million in terms of increasing the number of spares, spare aircraft in the system, creating a robust standby system for pilots and cabin crew.
We enhanced our spare part investment and logistics to make sure that if there is a technical matter, we can recover the aircraft as quickly as possible. We are a lot more robust. As a result, if you look at the European airline sectors operation year to date in 2024, actually, Wizz Air is the best performing airline in terms of completion rate. We canceled a bit more than 0.5% of our flights in this period, which is a huge improvement relative to last summer's 6% cancellation rate of the industry, and that also included us. We ended up with 179 aircraft at the end of the financial year.
This is significantly more than what we had a year before and even more relative to our pre-pandemic times, given the growth of the business. As said, completion rate has improved in the second half and ever since it's been improving, and it's solid as we speak. Okay, we will see what's gonna happen in summertime. Obviously, we are not into the peak summer operation, but we think that whatever happens in summer, in terms of the quality of the operating environment, we are a lot better prepared, and we are a lot more resilient and robust to cope with those issues. I'm not suggesting that we are expecting a perfect environment.
It won't be perfect, but we're gonna be a lot more ready to deal with it than last year. Liquidity remains strong with 1.53 billion EUR of cash on hand. During the year, we won the CAPA Global Environmental Sustainability Airline Award, which I think is a recognition of our innovations, our fleet enhancement, and our improving environmental performance relative to the industry. Could you please move the slide? If you look at the footprint of the business, it has not changed fundamentally in terms of market focus, but it has been growing significantly. As we have discussed, we look at Wizz Air in terms of geographical footprint on three pillars.
Bread and butter prone to the airlines operation remains Central and Eastern Europe. We have been growing in Central and Eastern Europe. The second pillar is our kind of select markets in Western Europe, that is, the London market, in particular Italy and Austria. The third pillar is the Go East strategy, which I think is probably best manifested by the operation and the creation of Wizz Air Abu Dhabi, but also we are expanding in the broader region, in the GCC and the Middle East as an inbound carrier.
With that eastbound expansion, obviously, the number of countries continues to grow and expected to grow even further in the future as we operate more and more into that part of the world. With that, let me hand over to Ian, who will take us through the financial details of the fiscal year, fiscal 2023. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you, József. Thanks, everyone. Nice to see you. Could you please turn... Oh, thank you to that slide. So I'm pleased to present the fiscal year 2023 audited numbers. The audit was signed off. I know everybody wants to talk about F 2024, but the year just happened, and we need to talk about it, so there are some highlights notwithstanding. We ended up with EUR 3.9 billion of revenue, which is 2.3 times what it was in F 2022, so more than doubling. However, for reasons we all know, our fuel costs tripled in the same period, in the prior year, compared to the prior year. It was at EUR 1.9 billion for the full year.
Non-fuel costs also came in higher than we would like, though, in H2, in the second half, we saw costs start to come down versus earlier in the year. Ultimately, we delivered a EBITDA figure of EUR 134 million versus a negative figure for the prior year. Our operating loss was flat year-on-year, showing some improvement off of a higher revenue base, and our final net profit number ended up at a loss of EUR 535 million for the year, broadly, in line with consensus. I do want to talk about some of the revenue performance, I'm gonna switch to the next slide.
You can see that, we delivered a RASK of EUR 0.0398, which is slightly higher than where we were in F20, roughly, and 2% higher for the second half of F20, but 33% higher than F22. This is due to a strong fare environment and continued ancillary growth. The investments that we made during the COVID period and in F23, in terms of our broader network, gives passengers more choice, and we are quite proud of the flexibility in the products that we offer.
Louder.
Louder?
Yeah.
Is my mic not adjusted?
No, it's just.
We're proud of the products that we offer, which we price using advanced computing to maximize revenue. Our ancillary products delivered EUR 2.29 more than last year, and EUR 5.32 more than F20, which is more than the target growth rate that we've been using in that category. The mix of ticket to ancillary remains roughly the same, around half. Nice progression there, and exciting things to come going forward. Next slide, please. Ex-fuel unit costs ended up 14% higher versus F20 for the full year.
Like I said, for H2, ex-fuel unit costs compared to F20, H2 were up 8%, which is in line with the guidance that we gave at Q3, where we said ex-fuel costs expected to come down to single digit increases versus F20. Versus fiscal year 2022, ex-fuel costs have also reduced 8%, which is driven by higher utilization, higher seat count, and overall cost reduction efforts that we embarked on over the winter. We faced the familiar challenges last year, such as the war in Ukraine, where we incurred costs associated with the reallocation of aircraft, capacity, and crew, high energy costs, and of course, all the disruption topics we've talked about over in the last few quarters that affected us last summer, including supply chain and labor shortages.
With the pandemic fully firmly behind us, we've gone back to forward planning and risk management. With fuel costs, you're going to see a much more competitive position as we've been layering in fuel hedges all last year and continue to do so. We also took a good look at our network and adjusted crew duties, invested in crew, added more spare standby crew, spare aircraft, established KPIs, looked at our maintenance strategy and our customer service strategy. A lot of investment finds its way into the cost base of F 23. We expect the results of that to then proceed into F 24 and likely limit the cost increases going forward. If we go to cash, next slide. The familiar waterfall.
You can see how we're managing cash. Predictably, operating cash reduced over the year in line with our net loss. However, that was offset by inflows in revenue, so ticket sales associated with unfunded revenues, so ticket sales collected for future flights. A slight increase in working capital, and that's, you know, basically in regards to payment terms and being able to, as a bigger airline, with our scale, drive better pricing arrangements and working capital arrangements with our customer base.
We had a cash outflow with regards to our U.K. and E.U. emissions tradings, credits, and that's an inventory item that we buy forward, and so we're fully protected for the year on that, and that's something that is a cash outflow. We saw PDP payment refunds. So those are deposits that we place with the manufacturer that get returned to us when we take an aircraft delivery. We have a EUR 245 million inflow from a draw on the PDP facility, which we had talked about in prior quarters. At the last earnings announcement, we were close to finalizing, but finalized in this last quarter.
We ended up the year with EUR 1.5 billion in cash, including that PDP facility. And what that really is, the way to think about that, is more of an acceleration of future deposit refunds, it's a timing issue as opposed to a traditional leverage style instrument. However, you'll see how it's reflected in the balance sheet. Next slide, please. Comparing cash balances over the last four years, you can see that we tend to hover around EUR 1.5, and that's by design, EUR 1.5 billion. You'll see that cash number grow as the business grows. Obviously, we have an obligation in January, which is a EUR 500 million repayment, which we're anticipating and planning for. We're seeing a strong summer, right?
The cash balances are progressing slightly ahead of forecast currently. The business has performed like that throughout the winter. While we're very confident in where we are in cash, very pleased on where we are with cash. In terms of some of the dynamics on cash, if you think about where interest rates and deposit rates have moved since when we did the bond payments that we've been setting aside cash for, we're actually seeing a positive carry in terms of the cost of the debt and the cash that we're earning on our bank accounts. That's helping as well.
We, as I mentioned earlier, we have, you know, this is a bigger airline, dramatically bigger airline, we have a lot more leverage with our suppliers and our customers to be able to drive the right pricing and the right working capital terms. You also notice a trend where our restricted cash is starting to decrease, and that's because, historically, we've had to put certain deposit instruments in place on our aircraft leases and then cash collateralize that. As we now mature, continue to mature, we no longer have that style of obligation, which means that our restricted cash balances reduces as those old aircraft are redelivered and those leases expire and roll off of our fleet.
We see a trend there where our restricted cash starts to decrease, and that will continue going forward as we recycle our fleet continuously. Like I said, we have this PDP facility. There's actually a natural repayment profile in this. Every time a plane is delivered, rather than us getting the deposit like we would during a sale-leaseback, the deposit actually gets swept and goes towards repaying the facility. That facility, if you remember from the previous slide, was around EUR 245 million. That facility is coming down every time a plane is delivered. That will naturally amortize and be available to us in the future for the next two and a half years, should we require additional liquidity.
That's a facility that we plan on keeping in place to deal with any disruptions. Next slide, please. This is the last slide here. You can see that a dramatically bigger business in terms of flights. Load factor for the year just under 88%. As you've seen from the traffic numbers, is increasing, so we see a positive trend in load factor, and certainly significantly better than the prior year.
Our stage length is increasing, and that helps in terms of utilization as well, which is at 11 hours, so better than it was in the prior quarter, which is 10.5 hours, but still short of the 12-hour mark, which is where we're hitting now and looking to exceed, to end up closer to the 12.5 hour target that we put forward last quarter. And then in terms of regularity, this is a slide that, you know, doesn't paint a good picture last summer, where you see 96% completion or 4% cancellation in June.
You can see that since then, like we said, and like we promised, the targets that we set have delivered much higher, much better results, such that, certainly in this calendar year, we've seen north of 99% and consistently maybe since October. We're starting to see some improvements there, and we look to try and maintain that level ultimately as part of our customer service ambitions and our overall profitability. Overall, you know, we, there are no surprises in FY23. There are some positive things to talk about, and I'll hand the floor back over to József for fiscal year 2024. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Ian. I would like to take you through some slides here, which I think are important for you to understand, especially to understand what we are doing with operations, because it was a pain point in fiscal 2023. I think hopefully you will understand it, that it is totally rebased by now, and up against a very different performance standards than last year. Also, I'm gonna take you through a few slides on the demand side, on the market side, and talk a bit about fleet and sustainability, and trying to provide you with an outlook for the current financial year. Could you please move the slide? Could you please move the. Thank you. So unit cost.
I mean, obviously this is the most important issue for the airline. We are in a commodity business, lowest unit cost, lowest cost wins in commodities, and this is the business model what we have. We have to come back to where we were prior to the COVID breakout in terms of becoming, again, the lowest cost producer in the industry. I think we are well on the way to achieve that. If you look at the production side of the equation, seat kilometers, available seat kilometers are up 30% in the current financial year. Load factors are getting back to pre-pandemic levels, as well as utilization.
Actually, we are seeing utilization outperforming fiscal 2020 levels, we would be back to historical performance level. One significant difference, though, is the gauge of our aircraft, obviously that brings a lot of efficiencies to the equation. Now, the average seat count is 226, which was 219 last year, basically a lot lower back in fiscal 2020 when we were primarily operating A320s, the fleet has moved to A321s. In terms of efficiency, productivity, group productivity is improving quite dramatically in the current year. I mean, you recall last year, we had to drop fleet utilization, with that, we also dropped group productivity.
As now fleet utilization is enhanced back in into historical levels, group productivity comes with that. The fleet age continues to improve, so it's down to a little more than 4 years. With that, Wizz Air operates the youngest fleet of aircraft of any airline in Europe. Obviously, the scale benefit continues to unfold, enabling us to spread fixed costs across the system. We are going to operate 23 more aircraft in the financial year than last year. Importantly, given all the investments we have made into operational resilience and robustness, we are expecting disruptions to be a lot lower than last year. The 38% is not the intended improvement on cancellation rate.
We intend to improve cancellations a lot more than that. But overall, disruptions are expected to be still significant, but a lot lower than last year. With regard to fuel, we are back into hedging. 60% of our requirements in the current financial year are hedged. Fuel price is a lot lower than last financial year. Importantly, when it comes to fuel burn, now 63% of our fleet is constituted by new technology aircraft, the neo, the neo aircraft, which was only 7% in fiscal '20 and 49% in the last financial year. You hopefully can see that the platform, the operating parameters of the business, have improved dramatically versus last financial year.
Could you please move the slide? Talking about the operating platform and the and the resilience of the operating model, as said, we invested a lot, taking the learning of last summer. Basically, we took the position that no matter what happens in the operating environment, we simply have to be a lot more resilient ourselves, as opposed to just trying to rely on the performance of the supply chain. We've got the supply stream reconfirmed and committed by Airbus, and we are actually quite confident that what we are planning on in terms of aircraft deliveries will get delivered. We are stabilizing the summer flying program.
We made a lot of changes to the design of rostering to make sure that we can easier execute the rostering of the crews even under disturbed circumstances. We are increasing network and schedule density. That's important for recovery, especially. We have decentralized operations, basically, day-to-day operational decision making is no longer centralized, but is decentralized at AOC level. Basically, what it means is that we double down on headcount in operational management. We added, like, another 150 headcounts to day-to-day operational management to much better and robustly address the issues we are potentially dealing with. We increased spare aircraft and spare engine ratios in the business.
That's a significant investment to make sure that if there is a breakdown on whatever basis, we have spares to operate. We also increased spare parts, so we are stocking up on spares, and also we are enhancing capabilities for AOG recovery. We are enhancing the logistics and the supply chain around that internally and externally. We have done quite some automations to make sure that we are less reliant on labor resources, where there is a systemic solution to that. With that, of course, we were scaling systems and leveraging data as much as possible.
If you look at the results of that, so far, you look at regularity, we are the number one low-cost carrier in Europe, year to date. We are doing better than the European airline industry on completion rate. We are also doing better than the airline industry on on-time performance. You look at the D0, we are up 4% versus the European average, which is obviously a huge improvement versus where we were a year ago. We are doing better than any of the low-cost carriers we are competing with. Clearly, what we are seeing is that we made significant efforts.
We invested quite a lot financially, but also into headcount and other resources, and now we are seeing the performance improving as a result of that. Could you please move the slide? I think we've been gaining significant traction when it comes to brand recognition. We are holding the lines in Central and Eastern Europe, and we are seeing quite some improvements in terms of recognizing our brands in kind of new markets or the Western European markets or the newly invested markets. As you can see, I mean, obviously this is a process, but a significant progression has been achieved. We are really putting the customer in the forefront of our activities.
We inducted four new contact centers, call centers, to make sure that whatever claims or issues people may have, then we can actually react to those with with significant capacity. A lot of automation that has been happening, automating claims. I mean, we have no intention at all to to withhold any payments or anything from customers. Actually, what we want to make sure is that customers themselves can can resolve these these issues. We launched Amelia, a virtual assistant, on the WIZZ app. And now the claim backlog is back to pre-pandemic levels, actually lower than pre-pandemic levels.
We have also moved the logistics around disruptions with regard to hotel accommodation. We think that we are a lot better prepared to deal with the customer, whatever issues they may have. We are expecting the issues to be a lot less than last year, but whatever issues they still have, we are a lot better prepared to deal with them ourselves, and also through our partners who are processing these issues. Could you please move? We have been expanding in Central and Eastern Europe. Central and Eastern Europe remains bread and butter for the company, for the business, that's where most of the focus goes into. You can see that our market share positions have improved across the board pretty much.
Also we are improving our presence in the newly invested markets too. We are expecting a lot safer growth profile to come through the financial year than in the previous financial years. Previous financial years, we invested a lot into new markets, into new routes, et cetera. Here you can see that the backbone is already created, so we are essentially putting meat on the backbone. Most of the growth, 84% of growth, will comes through as increasing frequencies on existing services. 14% growth is joining existing dots, existing airports. Essentially, this growth profile of the business is a lot more de-risked versus the growth profile before. You can see that we are growing across the board.
We are growing significantly in the CEE core markets. If you take September as a snapshot, last year, we had 83 aircraft in these markets. This September, we are expecting to have 92 aircraft. If you look at the new markets, the United Arab Emirates, UK, Italy, Austria, et cetera, we had 49 aircraft, and that fleet will grow to 60 aircraft year-over-year. We are growing pretty much everywhere across the board across all markets. Could you please move the slide? Thank you. We're seeing that the fundamentals of the network are getting better and stronger, more enhanced, more robust. If you look at maturity, the network is maturing.
You just look at fiscal 22, you see that 15% of our capacity was less than a year old. I mean, obviously, this is financially the most distressing. That comes down to 4% in fiscal 24, so it's a lot stronger profile. If you look at the mix of the network, it is getting more diversified, still heavily VFR driven, but some other components, some other segments are also growing significantly. Leisure, for example, is coming to 21% of the capacity. Very importantly, when you look at the frequencies, we are increasing frequencies again. We are putting meat on the bone.
The backbone is there, now we are enhancing that with more frequencies. Obviously, more frequencies mean more operational reliability, but it also means higher yielding, being able to tap into higher-yielding traffic. We continue to balance capacity allotment across primary and secondary airports. 61% of our capacity is operated through secondary airports. Could you please move? Just a few words on the East. I think we are increasingly excited about the results of our East operations in the UAE. Our Wizz Air Abu Dhabi network is now growing to almost 40 destinations, that's a continuous process.
The fleet is growing, nearly doubling to 15 aircraft, and brand awareness is very strongly improving as a result of our growth. We're seeing that we are absolutely adequate in bringing in the right products, right services to the needs of the market. Also, we are just taking off in Saudi as an inbound carrier. 24 routes are launched. Very quick traction in the marketplace with positive reactions. It's not only down to these two countries, but we are growing essentially across the board in the Middle East, Jordan, Egypt, but also in Central Asia, in most of the Stan countries. This is clearly a new market segment which excites us.
quite a lot for the future growth potential. With regard to the fleet, as said, we ended fiscal 2023 with 179 aircraft. We are expecting to end the current financial year with 205 aircraft. As said, we continue to up gauge with the deliveries of A321neos, so we are expecting average seat count to be 226 at the end of the financial year. 80% of the fleet, essentially, is now A321, mostly neo and some CEOs. I think that is a tremendous transformation of the operating platform. 5 years ago, we were 180 some seats per aircraft, predominantly A320, the operation.
I probably can say that we have transformed the operation of Wizz Air from A320 to A321 by now. As said, the fleet age continues to fall. As a result, obviously, we are deriving significant economic benefits, unit cost benefits, as well as environmental benefits from that. Good. Talking about environment, sustainability, Wizz Air has been recognized increasingly globally of its environmental performance being the lowest carbon footprint airline in Europe, but one of the lowest in the world as well. You can see our performance in fiscal 2023, a lot stronger than even our next best competitor, and clearly miles and more better than the industry.
Our footprint, measured as carbon dioxide per revenue kilometer, continues to fall. In the current financial year, we are expecting actually quite a significant reduction of our carbon footprint by around 9%. This remains in our focus. You know that we have taken a number of initiatives, not only relying on technology, but also investing into SAF, various commercial agreements, and also equity investments into SAF initiatives. We think that's kind of a second pillar of our sustainability commitment next to our best use of existing technology. The third pillar is obviously the transformation of the industry into a brand new technology, quite likely hydrogen.
th Airbus to try to define the next hydrogen-powered plane and the operation of that plane, which is probably 15-20 years down the line, but we want to make sure that we are affecting that process already. Really, our sustainability strategy is based on three pillars: maximizing use of existing technology, investing into SAF to bridge between current technology and the new technology, and also affecting the new technology by getting involved into development of the hydrogen plane. We have been growing the organization substantially. Now we have over 7,300 people working for the company. We hired 2,500 people last year, and we continue that rate going forward
Very quickly, actually, a good year from now, the company will reach the 10,000 mark, in terms of number of employees. We put in a number of programs in place to aid people's career development, whether they are in the office or they are in the flight deck or in the cabin. On the one hand, this is obviously serving retention purposes, but also most importantly, it also serves long-term loyalty purposes. We also got involved into a number of charity type of operations. We allotted 200,000 free tickets to Ukrainian refugees. We did rescue flights to Turkey after the earthquake.
We try to be good to society and try to find our place to be as helpful as we can be given the circumstances. We enhanced our governance processes. We appointed a Deputy Chair of the board, Stephen Johnson, and also set up a new committee, the Safety, Security and Operational Compliance Committee. We improved the diversity of the board of directors. We think that we are kind of moving and enhancing our standing on each front of ESG, be it sustainability, being be it governance or be be the the social aspects of the company. With regard to outlook, we are expecting 30% capacity growth in the financial year.
That's pretty much equally split, between first half and the second half. Stage length is probably gonna be around mid-single digit, given the growth of the eastern operation that implies longer stage length. Load factors will come back to pre-pandemic levels, so above 90%, well above 90%, I would say, so more approaching mid-90s. Next year, our costs will continue to fall, as we are ramping up the efficiencies of operations, especially fleet utilization, group productivity, and completion rate. The tax rate is going to be somewhat higher than before. We are expecting roughly around 10%.
We moved the tax residency of Wizz Air Hungary, the airline, from Switzerland to Hungary, and that affects the tax rate on a going-forward basis. We are guiding on net profit of EUR 350 million-EUR 450 million. Maybe just to spend a few moments on the swing of EUR 1 billion in profitability over the year. Three major building blocks for that, roughly around EUR 400 million, would be accounted on the basis of revenue improvement. I mean, again, just put that in perspective. Last year, lots of new market investments, the reshuffling of capacity from Ukraine, Russia to other markets, obviously distressing revenue performance. All those maturities are now flowing through the system, resulting in roughly around EUR 400 million contribution to profit.
The second block is actual cost reduction. I mean, this is the core. This is what we can affect. This is what we can manage. That comes through on the basis of operation improvements, so fleet utilization, group productivity and schedule completion, less disruption, less disruption cost. The remaining EUR 400 million would be the blend of the macros, essentially favorable fuel prices, and significant fuel volume hedged already, and somewhat balancing FX rates, netting roughly around EUR 400 million. When you look at the swings, that's kind of the construct of the EUR 1 billion coming from these three pillars. I think with that, I would close the presentation. It's over to you for questions.
Ask the questions.
Good morning, gentlemen. I'll ask three. It's Jarred Castle from UBS. Your passenger tickets, the revenue from a passenger ticket was still down for the full year versus pre-COVID, but obviously four Q, nicely up versus pre-COVID. You say, kind of first half of the year, ticket fares are going to be up year-over-year. In relation to Q4, can you give any kind of color sequentially on how things are improving? I guess you've just put up that EUR 400 million number in the presentation. How you think, is that Can you split that maybe in terms of how you're thinking about fare increases within that? Maybe that's two, I don't know.
Just kind of net debt, you know, it's at EUR 4 billion, you know, 30 times net debt to EBITDA for last year, but it's probably dropping down 4-5 times net debt to EBITDA this year, maybe even lower, depending what you generate. Where are you comfortable? Like, you know, what kind of rate would you like to be at? You know, 1-2 times net debt EBITDA, or is it just more about investment grade, in terms of thinking? Just related to fleet, you talk about attractive financing. You've got some stuff coming up. Incrementally, what are you thinking in terms of incremental interest rate costs or cost of financing? Thanks.
I take the revenue. I mean, I think the best way to look at revenue is that most of the distressed revenue came in the first half of last financial year. Ever since, we have been improving. With regard to HH, we are clearly up, not only versus last year, but versus pre-pandemic times as well. The split of the EUR 400 billion is roughly half of it comes on fares and half of it on load factor.
Okay. In terms of net debt, you know, we aspire to be in a situation where the only debt we have is the debt that's put on our balance sheet due to the IFRS 16 treatment. We don't really want to have external debt, and we have no plans to continue to require external debt. The debt that we have is a legacy issue from the COVID times, where we were managing liquidity. We expect that the net debt ratio will come down as profit is generated. The sweet spot from a ratings agency perspective is around 2.5 times. We're not necessarily managing the business because of ratings.
We think the rating is nice to have, and it certainly helps the story, and it helps in certain markets with regards to fleet financing. We, as you know, now have a split rating, where we lost our Moody's investment grade. After these results, we will engage with them to get that back. We actually found that there was no impact having a split rating on our fleet financing. The fleet financings that we have currently, we are fully committed, and we've made commitments to lessors for the remainder of fiscal 2024. There's still an RFP out there, where we're still awarding, and we see zero issues with regards to the split rating impacting our rates.
What's obviously impacting our rates is the increase in base rates, and but that's affecting everybody. However, we consistently hear that the combination from a lessor portfolio balancing perspective, the combination of the Wizz Air credit split investment grade with the quality of the asset, which is the newest, most fuel-efficient, most desirable aircraft, satisfies the portfolio requirement that many lessors are required to deliver on. That makes us a very attractive opportunity for financiers, and we see multiple times subscription multiples when it comes to our RFPs, as we go out there.
I mean, just adding on the fleet financing question. I mean, we are not seeing any changes in terms of financing margins. I think we are retaining the margins. Of course, the base rate flows through the financing costs. I think we are really managing the margin side of the equation, so we have not been seeing any inflation on that side.
Thanks. Alex Irving from Bernstein. Last three as well, please. First one on network structure. As you went into last summer, I think there was discussion around the management team that the network was too complex. We had doubly patterns, we had too many connections within a single day. Are you happy with where that is now, or is there further to do as we simplify into the coming summer period? Second, around engines. If I have my facts right, I think you still have some GTF engines on most of your fleet. We've seen comments around the industry that the engines aren't behaving correctly in all conditions, particularly in hotter climates. Are you seeing any issues here on your planes? Finally, on Saudi. I've been talking about the joint venture for a while. Clearly, we're doing inbound flying into Saudi. Any update on a potential JV there, please?
Yeah. Thank you. With regard to the network structure, I think we have simplified the rostering structure a lot. I mean, the network structure kind of flew through the rostering as such, that it was quite to the edge in terms of productivity of the roster, which worked very well in a well-functioning supply chain environment, but broke down in a dysfunctioning supply chain environment. We have made all those simplifications. It is a lot more eased rostering pattern than what we used to have. Obviously, that adds to operational reliance, resilience, and robustness with that regard. I think it is a lot better than what it used to be.
With regard to the GTF issue, I don't think that the problem is down to the GTF only. I think this is more like the childhood diseases of new technology coming to the market, which simply just needs to mature. Maybe the manufacturers were too eager to come to market, and they should have done more testing and more maturity themselves. They kind of outsourced all these diseases on the industry, but that's what it is. I mean, the GTF has performance problems mainly in a hot temperature severe operating environment, like the Middle East. As a result, we decided that most of the Wizz Air Abu Dhabi fleet will get replaced with classic A321s.
We are de-risking the GTF performance issues, with that. Now, that doesn't mean that the V2500 engine operates the same way in Abu Dhabi as in Europe. Europe is considered to be a benign environment, but it means that it is a mature technology, so it is a lot less subject to unexpected breakdowns. In terms of GTF operation in Europe, I think it's not perfect, but it is manageable. We are probably the one airline in the world that has not been grounding aircraft because of engines. I think everyone else started grounding because of running out of spares.
We have stocked up on spares on the one hand, and I think the way we have been allocating and operating the engines, maybe with some luck, we have been able to maintain operational integrity without grounding aircraft. I hope we can maintain it that way. With regard to Saudi, yes, we announced a joint venture, and actually we have a joint venture in place. We are not yet there to make an announcement on airline operation. We are still seeking ways of exploring opportunities in a way, whether or not we should be operating as a base carrier in Saudi, similar to the Abu Dhabi operation.
Yet, we have made commitments to operate as an inbound carrier to the market with 24 routes, and those routes are doing very well. Once we have news, we will give it announce.
I just think. Well, just one point on the engines. I think it's also just important to maintain perspective. Okay, we have nine aircraft based in Abu Dhabi. It's still a very important market for us, and we're very excited about it. In proportion to the overall portfolio, you know, we're not it's not as if our entire fleet is based there. We're being very strategic about how we preempt what potentially could happen based upon that environment by the measures that Joe spoke about. Just keep that perspective, too.
This Satish from Citigroup. I got three questions here. Just going back to the revenue improvement of about EUR 400 million. That's like 10% growth year on year, and you're growing capacity by 30% year on year. I'm just trying to understand here, what's happening to the yield assumptions there? You said 50% improvement comes from the fares, but the math doesn't seem to add up like 10% revenue, but 30% capacity growth. Just on the capacity growth, how should we think about into 2024? How much of what would be deployed on the existing routes, i.e., increasing more frequencies versus, say, new route mix? The third question is mainly around the load factor. Where are you seeing the news that you launched, that has come into the operations? How the load factors look compared to the rest of the network? Thank you.
Maybe I start with the load factor question. I mean, it's gonna go back to where it was. I mean, we were at 93%, 95%, we're gonna be 93%, 95%, so I wouldn't worry about load factor, to be honest. I think what you saw, in the previous financial years, I mean, first 2 years of COVID, obviously we got affected by government-imposed restrictions, and that limited demand, and then that affected load factor performance of the airline.
Last year, predominantly, we were affected by the Ukraine reshuffle, capacity reshuffle, and also still the investments into new markets, and obviously there is a bit of a build-up of load factors. Now, relative to that situation, this is all mature business, so you should be expecting a mature load factor performance. I think your expectation should be to see Wizz Air load factor performance be back into pre-COVID times, so somewhere around the 93.5% level. With regard to revenue, again, unit revenue keeps growing, because of maturity. If you look at the growth profile of the business this year, and I was talking about it during the presentation, it is a very different profile versus previous years.
Previous years, a lot of risk, new countries, new markets, new routes, new destinations, everything new. When you enter a new uncharted territory, obviously, the revenue risk is a lot greater than established market growth. Now this is all established market growth. Essentially, not only established market, it is established routes. We are just putting more frequencies on existing routes. 84% of the growth this year will come through frequency increases. This is the most reduced growth profile you can deliver as an airline. That's why you see the combination of 30% capacity growth and 10% yield improvement, because you kind of get a tailwind.
Also, you need to put that in context of the industry. I mean, the industry is getting exposed to significant cost increases. As a result, yields are increasing, fares are increasing in the marketplace. With that regard, I think we are in a more benign revenue environment than probably ever before, and that's why we can take advantage of that. So far, what we have been seeing in bookings would totally confirm this view. This is not like a theoretical view, but this is very empirical. With regard to, yeah, capacity, we were talking about how we are growing capacity.
Hi, it's Andrew Lobbenberg from Barclays. 3 questions: Can you talk about why you've gone for this predelivery payment facility when current trading is very strong, working capital is favorable, and you seem very confident in the performance of the business going forward? Why did you need to secure that cash? Second question would be around crew. You spoke about working on retention structures for senior cockpit and cabin. How much of a challenge is poaching and, you know, having people try to steal your crew, and indeed, recruiting crew to support the operation? Then the third final question would be around ETS. You tell us you're fully covered for the year ahead. You don't give us guidance on what price you're paying per certificate. Can you offer us any help on modeling the ETS costs? Thank you.
Well, from my perspective, we took the PDP facility not because we were excited about that facility to become available to us. We took it because of an insurance policy. We took that decision 6 months ago. I mean, a lot has changed over the last 6 months. I mean, you are seeing that the business is back on track. Six months ago, we were hoping the business to be back on track, we didn't have that empirical evidence. We simply just took an insurance policy on that. The PDP facility is sort of phasing itself out. As we are putting up the money against actual PDP, essentially, this facility is just kind of melting down on a gradual basis.
I would take it like an insurance policy, we paid for. With regard to crew, that's a good question. I mean, obviously, there is a lot of kind of stress coming, especially from the pilot market. I think Wizz Air is distinctly different from most of the other airlines. I mean, first of all, I think we are very carrier-driven, given the high growth of the business. People, pilots, cabin crew recognize the benefit of such model, being able to move their carrier a lot quicker and a lot faster than in other airlines.
If you, I don't know, take a pilot, let's say, at Lufthansa, you join as a first officer, I think kind of the promotional age is somewhere around 18-19 years to become a captain. At Wizz, should you do a good job, within 4-5 years, you are a captain. That's hugely attractive. This is hugely attractive. This is why we are putting all these seniority schemes into play to make sure that once people reach this carrier step, they are still retained. Because in the early phase of their carrier, the carrier prospect will serve as a retention tool because they can move quickly.
Beyond that, we need to make sure that they are also retained, and they see the incentives, why they should be staying at Wizz. It is a more volatile market than before, but we're seeing that we are able to remain attractive to the market. Also, I would say that it's not only retaining existing people, but we are also grooming a lot of and breeding a lot of pilots and cabin crew ourselves, especially pilots. We try to get people into the company at a very early stage of their pilot career to make sure that we train them up, we develop them, we give them a job, and with that, we retain them for the longer run. ETS, you want to say?
Yeah. The average ETS price for the forward purchases that we've made is around 75 EUR.
Hey, good morning. It's Harry Gowers from JP Morgan. Two questions: Could I first just ask about the ex-fuel CASK? I mean, previously, I think you'd alluded to returning to pre-pandemic levels across 2024. Is that still the case? If not, has anything changed or worsened on the cost side? Second one, obviously, appreciate the net income range and some of the other bits of guidance which have been given. Maybe within that, could you tell us what you've baked in, roughly, in terms of the jet fuel spot price and FX rate as well for the open fuel exposure part in your assumptions? Any steer on interest costs for this year? Thanks.
Look, I mean, by not guiding towards a specific ex-fuel CASK number, does not mean that we've somehow relaxed our commitment to getting to pre-pandemic ex-fuel CASK levels. That's why we were clear to say that we are showing an improvement year-over-year. However, we're only two months into the year. We have a lot to do and a lot more to get through the summer, in particular, with an environment that still is more disruptive than I think we thought of it would be at this time, maybe last year or even six months ago. It's just too early to give a specific number in terms of what we think the ex-fuel CASK number is going to be.
We want to leave some time to be able to do so, and we want to leave some time to see how the summer progresses, relative to our own investments and those of our peers. It's something that very much remains our focus, it's very much our target, and the name of our game is ex-fuel CASK reduction. We will come back to you in subsequent events, or subsequent meetings to give you some more feedback on that.
Price on F.X.
Yeah. In terms of the fuel price, we've been pleased to see the movement in fuel since when we did our budgets and to where we are now. I would take the midpoint between where fuel was in February and where fuel is now, as sort of the number that I would reflect on in terms of your modeling. The last one was a steer on interest. Yeah, look, I mean, we talked about the leasing rates and how we're only really affected by the base rate, not the margin. You know, we don't really plan on having any more debt or utilizing any more debt.
In many respects, the interest costs, to me, don't feature, because my objective is to repay all third-party debt as much as possible. You know, ultimately, I think that, you know, there's a wait-and-see approach happening now, on a macro level. You know, back to the PDP facility, which is the only real facility we'll have after the bonds are repaid, we don't plan on using it anymore. We used it at the time because of the uncertainty back in November, when we started the conversation around where things were in recessions and things like that. We've put it to have it on, in place. We're repaying it, and then we won't use it again unless something changes.
Obviously, all this is subject to the usual carve-outs around any escalations in the macro world.
Morning. Neil Glynn from AIR CONTROL TOWER . I'll keep it to two questions, booking the trend. The first one, a structural question rather than a guidance question on seasonality. You're not the only carrier to report a big winter loss, but pre-pandemic, your performance was, give or take, break-even in the winter. You've obviously highlighted that leisure traffic has displaced VFR in terms of your customer mix, and you've grown a lot since the, since the pandemic. I'm just interested, how do you think about winter trading going forward? Should it look comparable to pre-pandemic in terms of break-even-ish, or has there been a structural change in that dynamic? The second question, you've recently launched a flight subscription service, which is quite interesting.
I know it's very early, but can you share your expectations with respect to the help on revenue per passenger, to the extent that it helps, and early traction of that new product in the market?
Okay, let me try to tackle this. With regard to seasonality, yeah, I mean, I think when you look at winter on a consolidated basis, it should be around break even, give or take, okay? I mean, given the size of the business, I think it can be anything, I don't know, between EUR 100 million loss to a EUR 100 million profit kind of range, but roughly dancing around the break-even line. If you look at the second half of fiscal 2023, I mean, we were not there to call ourselves consolidated, because we were still running the business with suboptimal utilization, suboptimal group productivity, although schedule completion came into play, I think that was already improving significantly.
I think once we are fully consolidated and normalized, that's kind of the performance level you should be expecting us to deliver. With regard to the MultiPass initiative, I think it's very exciting. It's kind of new in the industry. We tested it in Poland and Italy, and the test results were very encouraging, and on the basis, we decided to roll it out. It has just been rolled out as we speak, so I think it's hard to, you know, really comment on specific numbers, but we're seeing that it is a very strong loyalty scheme for the consumer, and also it is a strong revenue generating stream for the airline for us.
We think this is a proposition of a win-win, to reflect on loyalty on both sides.
Thanks very much. Conor Dwyer from Morgan Stanley. Two questions for me as well. One of the big concerns at the moment is obviously, you know, summer demand is looking quite strong, but it could roll over into the winter. I'm just wondering what level of flexibility you guys have, if any, in terms of both the pace of deliveries of new aircraft, but then in terms of the lease terms, is there a potential for you to be able to move to a more variable, you know, Power by the Hour again, on that? Finally, on hedging, obviously, back hedging for this year, do you think this is more of a permanent shift back to the hedging focus, or just while jet fuel prices are particularly volatile? Thank you very much.
With regard to winter demand, I mean, obviously, we have very limited visibility on winter bookings, we don't have sufficient data set to make a clear judgment on that. To be honest, I'm not seeing anything that would suggest that there is a storm coming. By the way, this discussion had been going on for 2 years. 2 years ago, okay, summer is good, but what's gonna happen in winter? Last year, okay, summer is good, but what's gonna happen in winter? Well, nothing happens in winter. And I'm not seeing anything that would suggest otherwise, going into this winter. I mean, really, the flexibility what you have is utilization.
I mean, it is not as flexible with the lessors that season by season, you just change the construct of the contract for the flight hour-based rent. I mean, obviously, you can always go back to Airbus and delay deliveries, and they would love us to do that because they could deliver the aircraft at a lot higher price to someone else, they would love us to do that.
I'm not sure that this is something what we would want to do ever, because clearly, this has become a scarce asset, and having possession to that, to that asset is I think is a, is a strategic priority for the business, and we should not lose of it. If it's a declining demand, we will have to take back the flying program, and we will have to reduce utilization of the fleet, but I don't think it would be structurally affecting the construct of the fleet.
Yeah. Just before hedging, I mean, you know, the feedback we get, during COVID, we didn't actually manipulate the leases. We continued to meet our obligations, and that's part of the reason why we see a maintained attractive costing, cost level for our leases, because particularly in some of the Far East markets, I mean, we deal with lessors around the world, but certainly in the Far East, one of the things that helped our reputation and our credibility was the fact that we maintained the leases as they were and didn't modify them, unlike other airlines. That has helped us, you know, post-COVID.
Just like if Airbus were happy to take the aircraft back, I think the lessors would be happy in many respects to take some of the aircraft back, too, if we asked. We don't see that as a necessity or a situation that we even contemplate at this point, because of the value of the assets right now and the fact that we have them where others are trying to get them. On the hedging, it's a permanent shift, so it's a policy that was put in place. It's a policy that we, that we execute against. We follow it, per policy. We look at the policy to make sure it's right, and we modify it, as necessary.
This is not a, this is not a temporary thing, because I think then, notwithstanding having a policy, it would be classified as speculation, and that's precisely what we're not doing right now. This is a risk management tool, and we're in the business of managing risk at this airline.
Hi there, Conroy Gaynor of Bloomberg Intelligence. Just a question on ancillaries. How much of this gain is sort of general demand-led consumers accepting inflation to travel versus deliberate actions you've taken on the product side to increase the revenue there? The other one is, in terms of airport handling and route charges, is there much headwind yet still to come from this? Or, you know, do you think now this is something that could start coming down on a per-seat basis as you scale up in certain locations?
, on ancillaries, I, you know, I think the ancillary performance of this is very structural, so I don't think this is subject to too much volatilities. We used to be saying that we're saying we can improve ancillaries by EUR 1 a year. Actually, we are a little bit ahead of that. Ancillaries are a lot more kind of waterproof in crisis situations. Inflationary issues come into play, or competitive issues come into play, or recession issues come into play a lot more on the ticket side than on the ancillary side. I think once you build your ancillary structure, I mean, that is pretty solid
I don't think that this is really subject to too many things. You know, we are kind of saying internally that we would be a lot better off transforming everything into ancillary, even if it's like 100% cannibalization of ticket revenue, simply because it's a lot more solid, it's a lot more resistant than ticket revenue. Ticket revenue is down to macroeconomic issues, consumer demand issues, competitive issues, God knows what, but ancillary revenues tend to be very solid, and they are holding up very firmly. I think we have all the incentives to put as much as we can into ancillary revenues, and they are a lot less volatile, lot less subject to inflations and other measures.
With regard to airport handling, I mean, I think it is still a bit of a black box in the system. I mean, of course, we are discussing all the issues with our airport and handling partners, and everyone is trying to make a significant effort to improve going forward. At the same time, I think labor inflation is creeping through especially handling layer. I think some constraints are creeping through the airport environment. I mean, London is a good example. I mean, all airports are becoming constrained, and, as a result, there is a scarcity game and a real estate game happening, and also an up-charging game happening as a result of that.
I think we need to watch out on all these on all these developments. I would take you back to the point we were making earlier, that we are still having 61% of our network flow through secondary airports. The secondary airport environment, I think, are a lot better to manage from our perspective, simply just because of the balance of power, if you wanna put it that way. We are in a lot better bargaining position than dealing with the primary large airports.
Yeah, in terms of just some of the numbers, I mean, we're seeing both airport and handling year-on-year for fiscal 2024 going down. If you think about the volume, that helps drive that down. There's 2 elements, I think, sort of the double whammy. One is that we're one of the few airlines that is growing as fast as we are, because of the fact that we have the fleet to support that growth, we're doubling down in terms of the frequencies, right? Flying to existing city pairs. We're adding volume, we're also deploying that volume onto existing routes, therefore, giving us better volume pricing with the existing airlines, with whom we have relationships with, that we can have the conversation with. That's what's driving those costs down year-on-year.
I think the other thing which comes to airports, I think this kind of a sustainability consciousness is growing there. You know, we are one of the very few airlines actually that can bring the A220 and neo, which is by far the most environmentally efficient aircraft today to the party. As a matter of fact, I think they are all looking into some sort of incentive schemes, how to get us into that territory. That's playing in our favor.
Muneebah Kayani from Bank of America. Just to follow up on ancillaries, actually. Your four-tier ancillaries were down sequentially. Anything to note there?
Sorry, what was down?
Ancillary per pax, was lower in 4Q and versus 3Q. Anything to note in there, or is there just, seasonality because of the Middle East in there? Just wanted to understand that.
I think it's just seasonality. I mean, there is nothing special going on.
Can you talk about your Western Europe growth plans? You talked about London and Austria. What are your thoughts on Italy, and what are you seeing there? Just on Middle East so far, like, what are the learnings and the kind of so far, and what's working, what would you change?
Okay. With regard to Western Europe, I mean, we are growing essentially in each of the markets in Western Europe. We have London, 2 airports, Luton and Gatwick. We are the largest operator in Luton, but we are up against passenger limits. In Gatwick, we are not a huge operator, but we have a 5-air base there, where we are up against slots at Gatwick. We are trying to expand our operations to an extent possible, but we are subject to these capacity constraints. Regarding Austria, we are growing Vienna. With regard to Italy, I think we are majorly growing Rome. I mean, Rome is really growing big. The whole country is growing big.
We are actually quite upbeat with regard to the Italian opportunity. We're seeing that this brings in the right kind of product to the needs of the market. Let's not forget, Italy is fairly similar to the UK with regard to low-cost carrier transformation. The bigger part of the Italian market is served by low-cost carriers like in the UK. We're seeing that we are an absolutely adequate airline with adequate product and services to the market.
With regard to the Middle East, I think the learnings are, it's a hell of a demand for this, and hell of a challenge for operating the airline, given the nature of the environment. As said, we are changing the fleet from neo to CEO in Abu Dhabi. I think that's kind of the learning, that new technology is great, but given the immature nature of new technology, it also poses significant challenges. We are kind of learning the right operating model. In terms of the demand side of the business, it is very strong. We should do more. I think with that, we need to wrap it up. It looks like we are up against the deadline.
Anything you wanna add?
There's no call.
Okay. Well, ladies and gentlemen, thanks again for coming. Thank you for your interest, see you next time. Thank you.