Good morning, everyone, welcome to this fourth quarter 2016 results presentation for the fourth quarter and the full year 2016 accounts. Norwegian is satisfied to present the best result in the company's history. If you look on the highlights for the fourth quarter, we had the final approval by DOT for our Norwegian Air International license. We reported an EBITDA of NOK 673 million versus a loss of NOK 266 million last year. Our load factor in the fourth quarter was up by 1% to 86%, and we added three new Boeing 737s to our fleet and one 787 Dreamliner. In addition to that, we got the two first A320neos, which were leased out to HK Express. During the fourth quarter, we started 50 new routes, and norwegian.com was voted the best low-cost airline website by the World Travel Awards.
We also reached a milestone for Norwegian Reward, which passed their fifth million member milestone. For the full year 2016, we reported an EBITDA of NOK 3.1 billion versus NOK 1.5 billion a year ago. Our load factor was up throughout the year and ended up at 88%, up two percentage points from last year. We added a total of 17 737-800s to our fleet, four Dreamliners, and the two A320neos, which were leased out. We started a total of 34 new routes, including the nine new intercontinental routes. We also launched new crew bases in Rome and Palma. Palma was the seventh base in Spain for us. We started up new long-haul routes or intercontinental routes between several U.S. cities and Paris.
We were, for the fourth time, awarded the best low-cost airline in Europe, and for the second time, the world's best low-cost long-haul airline. Our passenger growth continued in the fourth quarter, up 17% year-on-year, to a little over seven million passengers. If you look on our load factor, we had a 1% increase to 86% in the fourth quarter. As you can see, we have systematically built load factor over the last years, from high 70s to now high 80s. We had 28% traffic growth based on 27% growth in capacity. The capacity was driven by newer and longer routes, especially in our intercontinental operations. If you look on our market shares in the key airports, we grew our market share in all our key regional and domestic airports.
We had an increase of more than one million passengers in our Oslo Airport. As you can see, our strongest growth was in Spain, which now has become our second-largest market, with a growth of travelers of more than 1.6 million. If you look on our passenger growth on where passengers book, you can see that we had more than one million new passengers booking in our Spanish websites and over 3.6 million passengers in Spain, which now has become our second-largest market. We had our strongest growth rates in our intercontinental traffic to and from the U.S., in the Spanish market, both in domestic and international flights, and then in our U.K. operations. If you look on the Nordic markets, we grew in line with the market and with a 3% growth in Norway.
If you look on the total revenue in the fourth quarter, we had 15% revenue growth. The key drivers was new and more customers. We had new ancillary products. Our loyalty program Norwegian Reward was also a strong contributor to our growth. The unit revenue in the fourth quarter fell by 13%, as we have reported before, to NOK 0.32. If we adjust that for currency, the decline was 8%, mainly because of longer distance and new routes. If you look on the last five years, we have had an average growth rate of 18% per year. A deeper look at our ancillary revenue show that we had 20% growth in ancillary revenue to almost NOK 1 billion in the fourth quarter. Per passenger sales grew by 2% to NOK 129, up from NOK 126 a year ago. We do have seasonal variations in our ancillary sales.
The full year 2016 average was NOK 134 per passenger. In our intercontinental operations, we now have a total of 50 routes out for sale for 2017. We have added U.S., Barcelona, and from several cities in the U.S. to Barcelona, and we have added Copenhagen, San Francisco. We will launch new routes to other intercontinental markets and add frequency to the existing routes. Over the next two years, in 2017 and 2018, we will add 20 new Dreamliners to our fleet, expanding it from the current 12 long distance Dreamliners to 32 aircraft by the end of 2018. The strongest growth will be from Q3 2017 and onwards. If you look back on our performance in our Dreamliner growth, we've had a strong growth all the way since the start in 2013. We reported a huge loss in 2014 when we were building up operations.
In 2015, we could announce to the market that we were breaking even, with a total eight aircraft in operation. In 2016, we have added four new Dreamliners to our fleet, and we reported a load factor of 93% for our long-haul operations with the Dreamliners. Going forward, we will see 60% ASK growth in 2017, and we will double our production to almost 47 billion ASKs, our available seat kilometers, in 2018. If you look on the whole fleet, we currently have 116 aircraft. That is 12 Dreamliners and 104 737s in our operations. These are the aircraft we operate ourself. We will add 32 new aircraft in 2017 to our operations. Nine of those will be Dreamliners. If you look on our unit cost, how that compare to our competitors, we are at the end of 2016 on the full year reported numbers.
We have NOK 0.41 per ASK, which is quite competitive versus those competitors. We still aim to reduce that going forward. Going into the financials, we see that we have reported net revenue of NOK 6 billion for the fourth quarter, an improvement of NOK 800 million from last year. Our pre-tax profit at the fourth quarter ended at NOK 300 million, an improvement of NOK 1 billion from last year, mainly driven by lower fuel price and also positive gains on currency and hedging. If you look on the full year results, we reported NOK 26 billion in net revenue. Our EBITDA totaled NOK 3.1 billion, a doubling from a year ago. Our pre-tax profit for the full year was NOK 1.5 billion versus a small profit of NOK 75 million last year.
The main drivers for the full year as well was lower fuel cost offset by negative impact on currency. If you look on the clean EBITDA, that increased to NOK 3.2 billion. For the full year, if we take out other gains and losses which are related to hedging and currency, our EBITDA excluding those items was NOK 2.5 billion, an improvement of almost NOK 600 million from 2015. If you also take out the cost that we have non-recurring character, we had NOK 600 million of extra cost related to wet lease and extra care and compensations to passengers during the summer. Last year, that same number was NOK 400 million, if we include also the strike in 2015. Our clean EBITDA or the underlying results for Norwegian from operations was NOK 3.2 billion versus NOK 2.4 billion in 2015, an improvement of NOK 800 million from a year ago.
Looking on margins, we can see that our margins have recovered again. We had a hit at the beginning of the financial crisis with the market in 2008. We soon recovered with lower fuel prices as we grew scale in 2009 and onwards, and had so far our best year ever in 2009. Since then, we have had quite stable margins for a period until we launched long haul. Of course, the cost related to the long-haul launch in 2013 had a strong impact on our results in 2014. We are now through that most heavy investment phase. We are now starting to get the critical mass for our intercontinental Dreamliner fleet. With the low current fuel prices, our results has recovered sharply in 2016. If you look on our unit cost in the fourth quarter, we cut that by 2% to NOK 0.42.
If you adjust for currency, the reduction was 1% in underlying cost. Ex-fuel cost decreased by 1%, and those costs were flat in constant currency. It is important to add that these costs include all items, including wet lease and also including the extra cost we are now spending to build up preparing for our strong long-haul growth over the next couple of years. For the full year, we have cut our unit cost by 3% to NOK 0.41. This is 6% lower cost in constant currency. Our unit cost ex-fuel increased by 2% to NOK 0.32, mainly because of extra cost we are taking on to prepare for the future growth. That is training of pilots, hiring of pilots, and also lower utilization of crew. If you look on the pie on our cost composition, our fuel cost is stable at 22% now. Our personnel cost is at 16%.
Going forward, we have hedged our 50% or 52% of our fuel at roughly $50 per barrel. We have hedged 14% of the first half of 2018 on roughly the same levels. If you look on the cash flow, we reported a cash flow from operations of NOK 200 million for the fourth quarter, versus a negative cash flow from operations of NOK 300 million in fourth quarter last year. This was an improvement of NOK 500 million. If you look on the full year 2016, we had NOK 3 billion cash flow from operations, versus NOK 2.4 billion year before, an improvement of roughly NOK 700 million. We invested NOK 6.5 billion in new aircraft. That was lower than the expected $1 billion we had guided on, roughly NOK 8.5 billion, mainly because of delayed deliveries of the A320neos and also four sale-leasebacks we carried out as financing in the fourth quarter.
The NOK 6.5 billion of aircraft was financed with our own cash and NOK 3.3 billion in new debt. Our total cash reserves at the end of the quarter, and the end of the year was NOK 2.3 billion. On top of that, we established a new credit facility in the fourth quarter, which have NOK 0.7 billion in undrawn credits. Our equity improved by NOK 1 billion to NOK 4 billion. We added 13 new 737NGs to our balance sheet, and our total assets increased to NOK 22.5 billion in aircraft and NOK 7 billion in pre-delivery payments on future aircraft deliveries. These assets are financed with NOK 17.5 billion in external long-term debt, plus NOK 5.9 billion or close to NOK 6 billion in PDP financing and unsecured bonds.
We had a total NOK 21 billion in net debt, which was an increase from NOK 17 billion in 2015, an increase of NOK 4 billion. Our equity ratio increased to 11%. If we add back market value of Bank Norwegian or Norwegian Finans Holding, which is listed on Oslo Stock Exchange, our equity ratio would be 16%. If you look into 2017 and onwards, our financing is on track. We expect CapEx to be a little bit lower than we have indicated previously, NOK 1.8 billion for 2017, a reduction of NOK 300 million versus what we have said before, because of delayed deliveries from Airbus. We also indicate CapEx of $2.1 billion for 2018. We have secured PDP financing for 50 NEOs. We also now placed a new unsecured bond of SEK 800 million in January.
We have the new credit facility of NOK 1 billion from December 2016. We have several sources of long-term financing we're working on. First of all, EXIM and ECA export credit financing will be available again. In 2016, we placed EETC financing, Enhanced Equipment Trust Certificates in the U.S. market for 10 aircraft. We have done several private placements in the U.S. market, we also see a very strong sale-leaseback market, and we carried out four sale-leasebacks in the fourth quarter, from the end of third quarter and through fourth quarter in 2016, and two additional sale-leasebacks now in January 2017. We have also utilized bank financing for the two A320neos.
If you look on 2017, the outlook, our comments to the market and business is that we do see a negative impact from the passenger tax in Norway, especially on domestic Norwegian flights. It's difficult to pass on the tax. This will hit our yields in the domestic Norwegian market. We do also see a weaker demand in the U.K. market post the Brexit vote last summer. If you look on our general bookings, our booking volumes are on par with last year. The bookings are satisfied and on par capacity adjusted. We do expect a growth of 30% in ASK, which is similar to our previous guidance. This will be stronger for our intercontinental flights with the Dreamliners, which will grow 60% in 2017 versus last year. We will see an increasing distance because we're growing on the longer flights.
Our unit cost is expected to be in the range of NOK 0.39-NOK 0.40. This is an increase from our previous indication of NOK 0.38-NOK 0.39. The change is primarily related to sale-leaseback of aircraft, which then move costs from depreciation to leasing. That's not a real cost increase, but also extra cost because of hiring and training on new crew, as we're taking on a much stronger growth over the next 12 months. For 2017, we expect to get 32 new aircraft into our operations. That is divided between 17 737-800s, which will be additions to our fleet, but also replacement of older leased aircraft. We're returning four old leases during the year.
We get six 737 MAX, the new version of the 737s, where we will be the launch customer in Europe at the end of the second quarter or early third quarter 2017. We get nine 787-9 Dreamliners into our intercontinental operations. We also get three A320neo, which all will be leased out to HK Express, which means that seven of our deliveries are delayed into 2018 and onwards. In summary, 2016 has been a good year for Norwegian. It's the strongest full-year result in the company's history. We continue to build our load factor, and we reached 88%, and now it is climbing towards 90% load factor. We do see continued passenger growth, and the growth will be even stronger in 2017 and 2018. We are now preparing for a strong global expansion.
We're launching the new intercontinental routes with the 737 MAX, our financing is on track. Thank you.