Very good morning, everyone, and welcome to this Norse Atlantic Airways Q3 Presentation. My name is Bjørn Larsen, and together with our CFO, Anders Jomaas, I'll take you through both what the Q3 2024 looks like and a little bit about how the future looks, in our opinion. Quick on to the Q3. We had a disappointing quarter, to be frank. We were getting lower revenues than we had expected, and hence, despite passenger numbers going up, the ticket fares were not at a level where we hadn't anticipated. Subsequently, we ended up with a loss of $6 million. There are a number of underlying reasons for that, and we'll be happy to come back to it, but all things and straight to the bottom line, that was the result of Q3 2024. Passenger numbers went up by almost 22%.
Load factors also went up in the quarter, and we had a revenue rise of 8%, up to $222 million, and an EBITDA of $27 million. We do not expect 2024 to be profitable, full year or the rest of the year, but we do expect 2025 to be profitable. Now, a bit about what we have worked with, because when we have been working in the space, we have communicated earlier that we are in a transformational phase. So we have spent the last few months transforming the company into something very different, and what you will see is that Norse Atlantic 2025 will be a much more balanced airline in terms of own network, selling tickets and chartering out our aircraft to other airlines.
And we have worked for a long time to secure both this winter, but even more so the long-term future. And we have signed just now an LOI for six aircraft that will go on a longer-term charter to another reputable and major international airline. At the same time, while we are taking 50% of our fleet into longer-term charters, we are keeping the network, and we are keeping, obviously, the best 50% part of the network. And not only that, we are able to, both because we are changing the business model, but also because starvation is the mother of innovation, we have revamped how we do things both commercially and operationally.
So we have been able now to, and I'll come back to that in a second, we have been able to increase the load factors going forward and significantly increase revenues for the flights that we're gonna fly as a scheduled airline. So it's actually a win-win. And on top of that, the cost that we will have both in our SG&A, but also in the OpEx for the aircraft will go significantly down in 2025. Couple of more items. I have been offered the opportunity to invest more in the company by the board. I have been grateful and appreciated that opportunity. So I am investing another $8.7 million in equity, and I've also offered a loan of $6.3 million to the company.
We will, however, give other shareholders the same opportunity to invest, to make sure that it is a fair and balanced treatment. So there will be a repair offering. There is only so much I can say about the lease agreement, the long-term charter that we have signed an LOI for. And what you see on the screen behind me is exactly what we have agreed to say. I cannot give any more specifics than that, but it should give you an overview of the size of the contract, and it should also give you a feel for the duration, somehow. I'll be happy to, you know, go a bit more into details, but we can only be limited in our information right now, because we have agreed that with our customer.
So the transformation that we are talking about is, first and foremost, that we are going to charter out more of our capacity than we have done in the past, and in 2025, we will be up to six aircraft to one particular customer, and then we will be in the market for charters, for more charters in the wintertime. In the winter, we will be more a charter company than we are a scheduled airline. In the summertime, it will be. This summer is gonna be a bit more than 50/50, but the summers forward, 2026 onwards, it will be a 50/50 scheduled and long-term charter operation. The other thing we have done, which has been very significant, is that we have revamped the entire commercial team.
We have approached commercial or rather sales, pricing, revenue management, capacity management in a very different manner, and we have seen significant positive results in that. As I said, cost efficiency is extremely important. That's really the only parameter that we can control, at least to some extent. While we have been able to reduce our cost a little bit compared to last year, which I think is fairly okay in a very inflationary environment, we have still been able to reduce the cost. Our ambition is to go even further. Comparing 2024 to 2025, we expect to see a roughly 50% reduction in our SG&A and also significant reduction in crewing cost, mainly because we are able to streamline the bases and match it more to where we will be flying in 2025 onwards.
Now, this is kind of a repetition, but just to sort of underscore, 2024 has been a transformational year where we have revamped our business model. 2025 is the first year where we will see the results, both in terms of charters and in terms of lowering cost, and in 2026, there will be a full 50/50 type of operation. I also mentioned that we have cracked the commercial code, and we have done that. I call it our secret weapon, Norse Coders. They are approaching revenue management and commercial management with a very new mindset, totally unlike any legacy airline are approaching these issues, and I'm very proud to say that we have achieved significant positive results in our commercial management, both when it comes to load factors and when it comes to fares that we are able to get in the market.
And the proof of the pudding is really looking forward, just looking at this quarter alone, and these data are from the 27th of November, so two days ago. We are already in Q4 of this year, significantly higher than we were for the entire Q4 last year. We are trending much better for Q1 next year and Q2 next year in our scheduled network. And the numbers basically speak for themselves. And it's not only because we have a good revenue management team or because we have cracked the commercial code, but it's also because our customers love our product. We have affordable fares, great comfort, great quality product, and we see a lot of returning customers. And our best marketers are not what you see on your social media or on other type of digital media. Our best marketers are our customers.
They are taken very good care of by our crew. We have the best crew in the world, and it shows, so we have a product that we know has gained popularity, and that is why we are filling the aircraft again and again and very often with returning customers. In terms of efficiency, in terms of operational cost, we are on a good trajectory. We expect that we through automation through a different organization, because there is different skill set needed for the type of operation that we are going into, through technology and not least through a very lean focus, we will be able to reduce our SG&A significantly. We started that process in October, and it will carry on for the next six months, so we will see the full effect of that within six months from now, within first of May.
The same goes for the crew bases. We started off being very Norway-centric when we started the airline, flying a lot to and from Oslo. Commercially, it wasn't the best strategy, and we have obviously adopted a strategy so that in summer now, we are, for all practical purposes, a New York-based airline, more than anything else. We are flying out of JFK to six different places in Europe. We are flying a lot of destinations from Los Angeles. So a lot of our customers are American, more than 70% during summertime. So we have revamped the network. Of course, when you fly from A to B, it is important that you have your crew bases close to where you are flying. So that has also been a change that is in process, that will take down the cost.
The crew will be paid the same, but we are able to utilize the available crew resources to a much better extent so that we can reduce costs simply by better efficiency. Anders, maybe you'll say a few words about the transaction.
Yes, I will. Thank you, Bjørn Tore Larsen. As we have communicated this morning, we are raising another $15 million of new liquidity to the company. This is done through two things. Mainly, we're making use of a proxy given from the EGM to the board to print another 15% of shares. This will raise another $8.7 million. This is done through a private placement directed towards BTLCO, a company controlled by Bjørn Tore Larsen. In addition, BTLCO is providing a shareholder loan of $6.3 million, which has maturity end of next year, end of 2025.
So in total, we are raising $20 million, no, sorry, $15 million. As Bjørn Tore mentioned, we will make sure that all existing shareholders are offered the same to buy shares at the same term. So after New Year, we are planning a repair offering of, and if that is subscribed fully, that will raise another $37 million. But that will depend on market conditions and several other features. In addition, we already have an existing shareholder loan of $20 million. We have then extended maturity from December this year until end of March 2026. So that is really the most important now, raising another $15 million and extending maturity on the existing shareholder loan. Currently, BTLCO is 18.9% shareholder in the company, 18.88% to be correct. And following today's transaction, that shareholding will increase to 25%-29.5%. That's it.
So going back to Q3, we had a good operational performance. Again, we have a great team that carries out our operation. And I think our dispatchability is second to none. We are probably among the top 5% in the business in terms of dispatching planned flights. And we have also fairly good punctuality. We always want to be on time every flight, but there are a lot of factors within and outside our control as well. So 77% is deemed acceptable, but we want to see it higher. We had a strong growth in terms of of passenger numbers. We had a growth in terms of load factor, although as I said before, we are not happy with the load factor in July. July was a big disappointment to us, and we had, I'd say we missed out quite a lot of money in in that particular month.
No excuses. It is what it is. We saw air prices or airfares softening a little bit as well. We think we buy better, anticipating demand. We could probably have done a better job in securing revenue still for this particular summer. We don't do the same mistake twice. So I think you can expect to see, and as you have already seen from the other graphs, 2025 is gonna be very different. Still, we are able to reduce our cost. Our CASK is cost per available seat kilometer. So it's a little bit down about 2%. It goes in the right direction, and particularly having in mind that it is an inflationary environment and most of our competitors have actually seen cost increases. We have gone the other way, but we still we think we have a long way to go to be to reach our full potential.
As I said, the PRASK, which is revenue or passenger revenue per available seat kilometer, went down by 7%. Ancillary is still okay. We are measured in terms of ancillary revenue per passenger. We are number one in the world. It's not always a fair comparison because short haul companies obviously have shorter hauls, so shorter seat kilometers. But we think we are doing very well. We think we can do a little bit better there as well. But there is a limit to how much we can get in ancillary revenues. We still think there is room for another few percent this year. That is mainly because we will have other and new services, not because we are pricing up the ancillaries. Let's have a look at the detailed figures of Q3 and compare to last year.
We report revenues of $222 million, and that is up 8% YoY compared to quarter three last year. We increased the fleet capacity from 10 to 12 aircraft in that period, so a 20% increase. The load factor increased up to 86% as mentioned by Bjørn Tore. However, the fares reduced by 7%. Total cost increased by 19%, keeping in mind that the overall activity increased by 20%. So as Bjørn Tore mentioned again, we are slightly reducing the cost compared to the activity level. We are reporting EBITDA of $26.7 million and a bottom line loss of $6 million. Those of you who have followed those over time know that the accounting effect of the leasing cost is actually higher than we actually pay. If we take that into account this quarter, the loss would have been $2 million.
In terms of cash flow, we have positive operating cash flow of $28 million and positive working capital movements of $4 million. This is different from the same period last year and very much related to improved terms with the credit card companies, the acquirers, where we have during the quarter, during quarter three, we were able to secure better terms, which brought cash earlier to us than same period last year. The net change in free cash in the quarter is $2.7 million, and resulting in end of quarter cash of $25 million. Looking at the balance sheet and the credit card receivables here listed as $125 million is a very important feature of our balance sheet and one to look out for. That should then be compared to the deferred passenger revenue of $73 million.
So again, those two numbers are important when you're looking at our balance sheet. Included in the other current liabilities is the shareholder loan of $20 million with accrued interest, $21 million. And that results in the total picture here, then results in a negative equity, which is now $185 million. But again, if you look at the effect of those non-cash lease accounting costs and take a look at those from inception of the company, those have now grown to $159 million, which you need to take into account when you look at the negative equity. That's it for the numbers now. Happy to take questions later.
Thank you, Anders. To round it off, we have spent 2024, in particular the last half of 2024, to transform the business, going more into a balanced, long-term charter and own network.
We are in the process of securing our revenue or our scheduled network for 2025, and so far we are doing very well on that, and we are also in a painful but very important process to reduce our cost further, and this is work in progress, started, as I said, full scale in October and is going on for the next six months, so with that, I'll be very happy to take any questions either for Anders or for me. Okay, I think it's no questions, so with that, I'll thank everybody for joining us, and welcome on board again. Thank you.