Forward-looking statements. Any matters discussed today that are not historical facts, particularly comments regarding the company's future plans, objectives, and expected performance or guidance, are forward-looking statements. These statements are based on a range of assumptions that LATAM believes are reasonable, but are subject to uncertainties and risks that are discussed in detail in our published 20-F, earnings release, financial statements, and related CMF and SEC filings. The company's actual results may vary as a result of a variety of factors, which are discussed in detail in our SEC filings. Today, we have a great lineup of presentations ahead, as I mentioned. Our Paulo Miranda , our VP of Clients and Customer Experience, our Chief Customer and Experience Officer, will share our vision for elevating the travel experience and delivering a operational, exceptional operational performance, an area where we strive for excellence every day.
Finally, CFO Ramiro Alfonsín will discuss our advantages that serve as key differentiators in the market. We also have opportunities for an interactive Q&A session after the presentation. Finally, following our Q&A session, we will have a luncheon with management for those of you that are here in person, and we hope you will stay to attend it. I encourage you all to make the most of it. We'll have many of our senior executives here, as well as the four speakers that we have here today. Finally, I'd like to take a moment to thank our extremely dedicated team. We truly appreciate it. Also, a thank you to our friends here at the Stock Exchange for hosting.
Hello? Is this working? Can you hear me okay? Great. Thanks again. Thanks for having the opportunity to speak in front of you and to give you a little bit of... You know this pretty well, but very simple three aspects: largest airline group in Latin America, actually largest airline group in the Southern Hemisphere. Over 340 aircraft, 319 of those passengers, with a very broad mix of revenues, almost half national, and we are the clear number one leader in all of South America. We're also, at the same time, the largest cargo operator in the region.
Today, we operate 22 dedicated freighter airplanes, and we have a network of over 160 destinations that allows us to cover not only within South America, but also throughout the world, and complementing very well our passenger business with our belly use and the expertise of both having cargo and passenger together. So we're largest passenger, largest cargo airline, and also we have the largest frequent flyer program in the world. Actually, today, the seventh largest in terms of members. We have probably. There is no actual statistics, but probably have 50% of the ABC1s of all of South American databases today, and clearly, one program that has been excelling in terms of customer satisfaction and what we can deliver to our most loyal customers.
So, because passenger, cargo, and frequent flyer in Latin America, clearly the leader in the region. Our network is very broad. We have three main hubs: Lima, São Paulo, and Santiago. That allows us to cover pretty much all of South America. We connect also the U.S., Europe, Africa, and South Pacific. This is the only one-stop shop carrier in South America. There is no airline in the world, group of airlines in the world, that shape like the one LATAM has today to connect people within South America and to the world.
We're very proud and happy to have just surpassed the two-year mark on our very successful joint venture with Delta, which today allows us to serve almost 40% of the flows between South America and the U.S., that has grown at an extremely high rate, and that for sure is making a change in the way our passengers and Delta's passengers can connect South America to the U.S. For me, this is in one slide, what LATAM represents to Latin America. 42% of the passengers that fly within South America pick LATAM. This is twice as big as the largest operator in North America, which is American, 4x as big as the largest operator in Europe, which is Lufthansa.
Again, there's no airline group in the world that can have or has very anything that looks like close to the leadership that we have been able to create in the region today. And this is a unique situation, one that I believe it's unparalleled and will be unparalleled for a long time. Not only we have achieved this in the sense of our network, we have done this with extreme focus on cost. During the Chapter 11, during our... How do you say?
Restructuring.
Restructuring. There, there you go. Thank you. We put a ton of work in making sure that we could use the crisis in the best way possible. What you have on the left side, you've probably seen it many times, is what we were able to do in decreasing our fleet payments with a similar fleet of 340 aircraft, 40% less payments. We locked in this for many years, almost to the end of the decade. At the same time, we also secured orders from both Airbus and Boeing in the long term, under those very special moments when nobody knew if this industry was going to come back again. So very comfortable about what we have achieved. And what you see on the right, I think it's most striking and most interesting, which is our cost.
On the blue, you have the passenger cost. We take out the freighter cost out of the equation, just to compare apples to apples. We're basically half of what full-service carriers today have as cost of fuel. I think that the important point here is, this is not labor-related. Yeah, of course, a little bit of it. This is just intense work in making sure that we can run a very lean operation, okay? We're using what we have learned over the years. LATAM has been very concentrated in lowering its cost over the years, and this is one of the key things that we believe is a cornerstone to our success. Making sure that we can run a very, very efficient, very smooth, and very dependable operations for our customers.
Making sure that we don't let this advantage that we started creating during Chapter 11 be gone from us in the future. Very important topic in our minds every day. What's LATAM today? If I can put this in a few figures: almost $13 billion of revenues in the last 12 months, 17% growth vis-a-vis the previous 12 months, $2.8 billion in net EBITDA accumulated last 12 months, 37% growth over the previous period, $1.5 billion in operating income. A very unlevered balance sheet today, running at 1.9x as of June. If you saw today our guidance, even lower for what we expect is the remainder of the year, with very healthy margins. It's a company that is running under operational excellence. We are dependable.
We have been, year- in and year- out, one of the five most on-time performance airlines in the world for years now. We have demonstrated profitable growth. We're growing at mid-single digits, mid-teens this year, and we're doing that at the same time we can expand our margins beyond that. Running a very efficient operation at a very low cost, and needless to say, I think being very, very, very clear and very focused in creating shareholder value. So this is LATAM today in a nutshell. But we're in a region that has a lot of growth potential. South America is a very extensive geography, long distances that are measured in the thousands of kilometers, very little road infrastructure, very little rail infrastructure. In a market that is very unpenetrated. Today, on average, only 0.6 passengers per inhabitant in the region.
This is more or less what you saw in developed markets in the late 1970s, early 1980s, okay? 1/4th or 1/5th of the passengers per capita that you see today on developed economies. And as you can see there, you can see the different countries, a little bit of a split. But I think that Chile is a very interesting example because it shows that even in the region where we are, that it's still under-penetrated. It is not very difficult to see that you can double pretty much the number of passengers per inhabitant. Chile has been able to do it in the last 20 or 30 years. And in a region that everybody that does long-term projections expects to grow in traffic more than double what the traffic will grow in the developed world.
So big, big geographies, difficult to move around, air travel is essential, unpenetrated region of the world, high growth prospects. That's the ambiance where we live today at LATAM. And also, that a lot of companies had either to, like us, file for Chapter 11 or basically left the market. So it's also a region to the production, durability of engines, and so on. And LATAM, as you will see, Ramiro will show, has secured good, safe growth for taking advantage where you see today less players than before, and many of them probably being challenged by the circumstances of the OEMs, engine manufacturers, and the whole supply chain system as a whole. So when you take all this together and you put together the numbers. Oh, my God! Come on, let's dance.
Everybody!
Time for a dance.
All right, focus. So what you see here in gray, it's the participations we had in 2019 , and in blue in 2024 , in June. I think this is awesome. I mean, doesn't matter where you look, LATAM's position has improved. The international segments where we operate, but let me tell you one important thing about this here. This is the outcome. We don't measure ourselves by market share. That's not a target we follow. This is the outcome of consistent, dedicated, and concentrated observation of which are the flows where we can win, okay? So what you're seeing here, at the end of the day, is the result of that, and today, that footprint, together what's on the lower right-hand side, shows you the strength of the network of LATAM.
These are three of the most of the four most important airports in South America. The other one is Bogotá, and we have built a very strong leadership advantage on those very important hubs. In particular, I'd like to point out Guarulhos, São Paulo. This is the largest market in South America. Actually, it's the entrance door for international travel to Brazil. 70% of all international flows to Brazil go through this airport, 1.2x as big, or 1.3x as big as GOL. We have managed through these 4-5 years and taking advantage of our relative position to increase a permanent position. So this is very strong. Three of the most important markets, or the four most important markets, LATAM has a presence against cities in South America.
Which is the flexibility of moving our assets within our network, because the differentiation, the diversification we have on the left is good, but taking advantage, just as important. Last year, one important player in Colombia, Viva, went out of business. We were able to move in two weeks, one quarter of our capacity, flexibility of moving our assets around. And also, at the same time, we created a very high variable cost base on the last part of our capacity. Almost 100% of the last few percentage points of capacity run on a variable cost basis. That's very important because it allows us not only to take opportunities, but also to adjust quickly if we see an impact, for example, for a hike of fuel price and so on. We've done that, at the same time, we've worked on our product.
Today, we have, and as you will see, Paulo will show up, put immense, immense concentration and effort in making sure that our passengers every day fly better with us. We have a ton of customer preference. You will see the numbers in a minute, and we're providing choice. We are the only airline that can really provide choice. I can take you wherever you want. I can take you however you want. You can go from basic economy, you, how you decide to fly. Nobody, nobody can do that, and we're very focused on being extremely dependable. We understand that the time of our customers is key.
We want them to choose how they want to spend the time with us, and they have to be reliant on us being able to meet their needs and make sure that the travel is uneventful, and if something happens, that we are there for them. It's hard. We transport 230,000 passengers and 150,000 bags per day, so it's not easy to do that, but this is a huge focus for us, okay? Increasing results over time. We're flying more or less the same in terms of capacity as 2019, more or less the same, with almost $600 million more or a bit there, with very ample liquidity today. Today, our liquidity is almost 27% of our revenues, and we have done that, keeping our costs at bay.
Over this five-year period, you had 20% inflation in U.S. dollars, 30% inflation in local currency, our low debt level. That provides us with opportunities to grow, to take advantage of whatever we can see as opportunity in the market. But I also think a lot about relative advantage, and what is that? Is that at the end of the day, yes, we had to restructure. We had hard times, but you know what? The airlines in the Northern Hemisphere were saved by their governments that compete with us in South America decided not to restructure. That gives us the opportunity to be relatively better than them, and that means opportunity. Somebody will have to make a bigger and more difficult decision before I have to make it, and that allows me to take advantage of that decision.
That's a very unique place to be. You add that to the footprint, what I just showed you, and this is one of the few airline groups in the world, in my opinion, that has very good control over its own destiny. That's what we have built with LATAM since 2019 across the pandemic, our restructuring to today. When I think about the future and going forward, very simple, three things: purpose, customers, and sustainability and technology. What does this mean? That's LATAM's most important asset, is people. You know, no vaccines, not knowing how deadly the virus was, and we had people racing, risking their lives, risking their health, making sure that the few passengers that were flying were taken to the place where they wanted to go. We repatriated 100,000 people that were stranded across the world in the first months of the pandemic.
When you see the energy, the love, the purpose of those people, you just cannot not understand how important that is. Today, my most important responsibility as CEO is making sure that these guys, when they wake up in the morning, they feel that it makes sense to come here, not only professionally, but most importantly, personally, that it makes sense for them. And if I can get that connection, you know, execution happens, alignment happens, customer care, company people. That's why I spend so much time doing this. I think it's my most important responsibility. I'm committed to them. And when you do that, and you execute well, you start seeing the results. What you see here on the upper side, so the blue line is strategic NPS. So we measure this, we've done it for years, quarter after quarter.
It's vis-à-vis our competitors, so it's an open question, not only with respect to your last trip. That's operational NPS. This is vis-à-vis our competitors. You can see what we have been able to do in the last five years on the blue line. On the gray line, and I'm color-blind, so if it's green, apologies, I hope it's gray. That's the strategic NPS for our premium, for our premium passengers. We've been able basically to improve it 40 points over the last five years. And what you see on the orange or yellow line is under that same survey, what these passengers think of the most relevant competitors we have in the region. Now, if you want to take away few messages from this presentation, here's one: Look at the bottom line.
3 points, 40 points for premium passengers having the same cost. I wanted to take out the paradigm that you need to spend money to have your customers happy. Yes, it's important, the hardware is important. Believe me, the software is more important. The people is more important. Is the intelligent decisions on what is it that you can do to improve the experience of your customer without necessarily spending money that I don't think, at the end of the day, is needed, okay? This, for me, it's a break of paradigm. So when I showed you that cost gap vis-a-vis the, the traditional carriers, a significant portion of that is because we're able to do this at the same time without overinvesting.
So we take conscious, we believe, good decisions, and we focus on execution, making sure at the end of the day that who serves you, who is in front of you, cares about you. That's much more important than the hardware, believe me. If you're a passenger, and people recognize you, and they care about you, and they know your history, and if you messed up, they know, our people know, and they can try to make it up, that's 10x more important than the hamburger or the sandwich or the New York steak you get on top of your or on your plane. That doesn't mean that you don't have to take care of that. It's just that it's much more. It's much, I think, in my mind, it's much more forward. Very, very clear.
When you see this blue line and the evolution and the gray line, well, these are some of the results. What you have on the left side of the slide, vision of corporate travel agency in Brazil. They publish these numbers publicly, and what you see here is our market share in that group of travel agents, which has increased in five years, 11 points. If you remember the market shares from a few slides ago, the market share in domestic Brazil, we grew it in the same period by five points. This basically mean that we increased our market share in the corporate segment in Brazil twice as fast as our capacity share. What you see in the middle, it's another, I think, interesting data point, below 2% to more than 6%.
Yes, we started Premium Economy on all of our flights in between. On technology for a second. These are a couple of numbers that are interesting. What you have on the left, you know, it's conversion. So this is basically what, when you land in our webpage or use our app, what percentage of people end up buying at the end? See, I mean, we basically doubled that number between 2019 and 2024. This is the benchmark in this industry for this number. It would be great to see it, but this is the number of calls we receive per passenger, okay? So, think a little bit about, say, all right, it's a 150 people on one aircraft. You still have 20, or, well, in this case, less, 1/6th of 150 , 10, that reach out.
Good testament, again, of trying to really understand where is it that we have to put our focus. And what you see on the right, actually, well, that's our e-business platform today. You know, Delta is the largest U.S. e-business platform. At last year, at least, when I saw the public figures, it was number five. Well, we're actually bigger relative to our markets today. Largest e-retailer in Peru, second largest, third largest in Chile, fourth largest in Brazil. I saw a statistic the other day from a research company called Statista. They say that the e-business industry or the e-commerce industry in Latin America for 2024 will be $100 billion. If that number is right, we account for 6% of that, and that includes Mexico, where we have very little presence, okay?
Now, this is important, but what is most important is what is not here. Today, I think a lot about technology, but not just to the business, working hand in hand. I mean, think about technological companies today. They have a completely different way of operating, of organizing themselves, of bringing technology within. Think about us, old corporations born in the 20th century, some before. We still see this functional, you know, org chart that probably you've all seen, and the question I ask myself is: What are these guys doing different? Why does it make sense? And how you bring technology in. I think that the biggest challenge we have, and the one I think a lot about, is how do I integrate technology in a different way? It's good to see these numbers. The question is how you do it from within.
And Hernán will show you a little bit about digitalizing our maintenance organization, and by digitalizing, I do not mean just bringing software in. It's just putting, again, people working together and you will. Frequent flyer has been a key, a cornerstone of LATAM as well. This is how we've grown it. So basically, 60% more member retention. More than half of the segments today that our passengers fly are LATAM Pass members, and one out of five are Elite members, okay? An important source of premium revenue, and again, with an unparalleled network that serves a frequent flyer program that cannot be matched in Latin America today. Just about finished. This is important.
If you fast-forward to 2050 and you ask yourself, what is going to be or what was the biggest challenge for this industry to take it, that will do harm for the region? I think we're making good progress, but also working in making sure that we can offset our emissions, making sure that we can be less harmful to the environment. 97% of our plastics are away from our operation already today. We're working in bringing LATAM to zero waste to 2027. That means producing no trash, somehow recycling it. We're still far away from that target, but working intensely on that. You know what? We, at the end of the day, just as an organization, we are a social asset. We need to develop our business and do good at the same time.
So we also think a little bit actually, I think, about the citizens. You see, customers before being customers are citizens. They choose to be customers. So LATAM needs to be made up, then becoming customers. So just to finish, in a nutshell, you know, largest airline group in Latin America, largest frequent. You will see it, that has that will allow us to grow in a market that grows. That's what we have today. Where are we focused? Focused on our culture, making sure that our financial situation stays strong and becomes even stronger. Very, very focused on customer and shareholder, and that front and center.
And making sure that the largest airline group in Latin America that has impact on so many people, that connects South America as nobody can do it, that is needed by so many people that are far away from places like hospitals. You know, we do it, and we do it right. So thank you again very much for your time, and I'll pass it on to Paulo now. Thank you very much.
... Hello, everyone. Thank you. First of all, thank you so much for coming here to hear our story. Thanks, Roberto, for sharing a little bit of what we see every day, but we wanna bring it out so that we can also share with you. More than anything, I wanna highlight a couple things on the presentation, and talk about, you know, the premium traveler in general, what we're doing for products and certain points on Latin America as a potential, more than anything. You know, if we look and we compare, you know, the countries that we serve, that we have our home markets in size, yet it's underdeveloped. If you look, and Roberto already talked about that, it's 0.6 trips per capita comparing to what you see is opportunity.
The region has opportunity, and we're ready to capture it. When we talk about... of about 2.8%, CAGR, comparing to, U.S. and Europe, all the way up to 2040. When we look at luxury goods in general, there is a projection of that increasing to $50 billion by 2032. When we look at another index for the high net worth individuals, we see that Brazil and Chile are going to outperform the world. So I bring that not because those are data sources that we look at, but because we're trying to show and make it very clear that the region is growing, and it's growing very differently. There is potential in there for the premium segment.
In the presentation that Roberto just finished, you know, he talked about 2019 to the first half of 2024. So our own data is showing that we see some of that on our day-to-day. And what does it mean? You know, what do we do with that information? So in a market that's willing and ready, the customers that declare that they choose based on experience is 40%, up five points comparing to 2019. But more importantly, when we look at the yields that those passengers leave us, they're 10% higher than the average. So it's something that we are very, on the right side is typically, you know, the description of the carrier that has all services, and we check all the boxes. We have a global network. We do have premium cabins on every single flight.
Every LATAM flight has a premium cabin that you can select to fly in. We do have Wi-Fi in our narrow bodies, and we have a world... When we talk about our, what we wanna do, how humanize the relationship with our customers, is to make sure that we make our decisions based on data, and we know what's important to those segments. When we talk about choice, we wanna make sure that people choose how they wanna travel. We have from the very basic, just a backpack, all the way up to Premium Business, where you have access to lounges, and you have flat bed seats, and you have, you know, access, and Hernán is gonna talk a lot more about that and show you how we've been doing a really great job on that front.
We wanna make sure that we keep meeting the expectation from customers for everything that we do. We measure NPS in a couple different ways. You know, Roberto showed one that we call our strategic NPS, which is a comparison to other players in the market. This one is the post-flight survey. You land, you get an email asking about the experience of flying LATAM. And by this one, you know, we've been measuring it for a long time. If you look at the numbers from 2019 and compare to the first half of 2024, slightly below average LATAM, and now we are at 57. We grew that more than the base customer. That is important. Those are the people that are traveling with us more than once.
You know, we have several metrics, and we measure that for premium travelers flying on all cabins. This is not a business class cabin result. It's every single premium traveler flying LATAM, no matter where in the airplane, they're inside that number. And that tells us again that we're able to show and to take to our customers the experience that they're recognizing as a much improved one versus what we had in our baseline in 2019 . This is world-class performance. In the NPS methodology, anything above a 50, it's called the quality zone, so we feel like we're there. We need to push it a little harder, but huge improvement. So we do investments, and we keep pushing. Again, you know, we have a segment that's very clear.
We know that our customers have a preference for the premium experience, and they are electing by that. So we do have our business class on our wide-body aircraft that has a full flat bed seat. We are introducing a new one that now we're gonna go into the suite type, so we have a door as well on our 787-8. And we have what we call our premium economy product that extremely flexible. I'll go into that a little bit more, but two very important points. Both the aircraft and the premium economy product are the best products in the region for that segment. Family aircraft, we set it up in a way that we can flex this number of seats up front from two to seven on an A321, for example, or two to five on an A320.
Why is that important? Because not our markets are the same. You know, we can have a flight that goes out in the morning with a 100% load factor in the premium airplane turnaround, with four people in that market. It's kind of like the famous New York, L.A., Monday morning, and New York, L.A., maybe Wednesday at two. It's very different, the profile for the customers traveling during those times. So this allows us to be very flexible with the offer, making sure that we tailor it to the demand that we see on specific markets, and also allows us to the flexibility that Roberto mentioned when we rotate the aircraft and we move them around different markets and profile. You know, Brazil has a higher number, Chile has a higher number of premium travelers comparing to some leisure destinations in Colombia, for example.
So why is it good? It makes the operations much easier. You know, every time we have an aircraft change because of rotation, the seat numbers remain the same. I don't have to go and reallocate people inside the cabin, so it makes it much more efficient, for our people. We also use some creativity. So first, you know, an information, in South America, there's a lot of remote operations still, meaning you do not have enough, jet bridges to serve all the flights that an airport, which is preferred by the pri-- Very fancy, in an Audi car, all the way to the airplane. That has improved the NPS for that segment specifically. You know, when they see and they have the choice to... How do you personalize at scale?
You know, when you have the 80 million or close to 80 million passengers per year flying, and they're on board your aircraft, how do you get to that level? So we've been working very hard, you know, developing a tool for our crews, that before flight, that's the screenshot of their tool, they can see who's on board. They have basic information, name, you know, a document number, if there's a preference or not for some type of meals or something like that. But we also have in there what we call a take action. We have a little list that or flight, they know it. So when they talk to someone, it's personal. It's not just, "Hey, Joe, thanks for being here." It's like, "Hey, Joe, thanks for being here. I know that you're Black Signature-" names, it improves the NPS by 10 points.
It's remarkable what you can do with the mix of technology and giving tools to our people so they can shine on their day-to-day. We continue with that with our lounges so those are the locations that we have a VIP lounge. We have a, you know, Miami, Bogotá, Lima, Santiago, Ezeiza, and Guarulhos. Lima, we use a third party. In 2025 , we're gonna open our own. It's a key hub for LATAM, so we wanna make sure that we have control of the experience in there, and we offer to our customers the best. We have plans for a new one in Guarulhos as well. Our demand in there is pretty high, so we're making sure that we keep up with what we see and we also and you can have access to that.
On the right side is a picture of our signature lounge in Santiago. It's voted the best lounge in South America. If you have traveled to the region or if you plan on traveling to the region, I hope you have a chance to go see it and visit it. It's just a remarkable... We have an over 80 points. Touch on a couple of things from LATAM Pass. Roberto already mentioned it. It's the seventh largest loyalty program in the world for an airline, number one in Latin America, 48 million members, 1.5 million are what we call Elite tiers. We have 30% active rate for our members over the last 24 months.
We have over 60 points satisfaction, and about 10% of our daily passengers, you know, travel using or redeeming their miles for travel in the program. But more than anything, LATAM Pass allows us to create or to look for opportunities to monetize it with our customers. You know, beyond flight, we wanna make sure it's an everyday opportunity. We wanna make sure that people engage with it beyond just when they fly LATAM. Agreements and partnerships with banks in the region, top banks in each one of the countries that we operate. We have additionally over 100 different... car with gas, or you go to a grocery store or buy electrodomésticos.
I mean, we wanna make sure that we are present where our customers are, and if they want to interact with the program in that sense, it's an opportunity for both of us. Because we see that every time a customer goes from not part of the program to being part of the program, their rentability or profitability level goes up by one point five. And when they move from there to premium, where we talk about our Elite tier, when they're really engaged with the program, they come back. Now, it becomes a decision of, "I wanna fly with you because," and it's a whole more than just because you fly from A to B, because they have a relationship, because they perceive value, and we see that in our data.
So we keep pushing for that, and we wanna make sure that we keep positioning the program for everyday use. This is back to a page that Roberto showed, where, you know, customers are recommending us more than competition in South America. On the right side of the page, it's a measurement that we do for repeat customers. We look at everyone, the period, more than 8x , okay? And what we find is, for all customers, they've gone up comparing 2019 to 2024 . For more than 8x , it's 2x . So they're coming back, and they're flying a lot more with us comparing to what we had before, and we associate that of in services and consistency and dependability and so forth.... Again, just one example of technology.
Over here is something that we're doing with AIDA, our customer care group. So now, you know, people would call and have a menu to pick from. Now they call instantly, and because of that, customer satisfaction is up. So here, we're hitting on everything that we need for the customer point of view. Also, it allows us to investments in our products and services going forward. So we have, like I mentioned, the new business class, you know, that's coming with the 787 this week. By the way, that's gonna be the first one we're doing in-house, so that also gives us the opportunity to learn from the process and do it for less money than we pay somebody else to do it for us.
We are getting to 100% Wi-Fi on all narrow bodies by the second half of 2025. I already mentioned the lounges in Guarulhos in Miami, that we're gonna keep working on that, and it is to do much better for our customers. So the last slide, you know, I talked about a lot of our data, what we see. Here are experts saying, hey, you know, what we're doing internally and what we see internally is also being seen by external parties. And the way I like to look at that is, you know, if operations in there, and Hernán will talk more about it. We are operating really well, both on time and in terms of luggage or baggage. We have awards for World-Class Best Airline in South America, five stars.
This is at the end of the phrases; it's how many times we've won it in the last five years. So the first Best Airline in South America, we've gotten it three times. Five Stars Global and external organizations are also recognizing the transformation that we've done. We are very proud to have removed just about all single-use plastics from our cabins. The ones that remain are very hard to remove. It's like garbage bags, where it's, you know, the alternative is not that simple. And we have won an award as well for World-Class Loyalty Program just a few weeks ago. So thank you so much for hearing our story. I'll pass it on to Hernán.
Okay. I'm gonna show something afterwards. So I'm gonna be showing you how we execute sort of on the foundations that gets to the results that Paulo were showing you a little bit. So I'm gonna be talking about the operational execute and value. So these are the three pillars that we have operationally within LATAM. Before I start talking about the execution, just to give you a size, we operate 1,600 flights a day. Every 54 seconds, there is a plane taking off, a LATAM plane taking off around the world, anywhere around the world. In those terms, when we talk about OTP, this is Arrival 14. So this is the standard of the industry, how you measure the industry, in which you're right within 14 minutes of what you promised.
If you arrive 13 minutes late, it's an on time for the industry. It's an on-time arrival, okay? And we've been performing consistently delivering a good performance, and we were from 2019 on, we have been number one of the world in 2019, 2020, 2021, the second one of the world, 2022, the third one of the world, 2023. And these consistent results, it was not because we were thinking about Arrival 14. What we did was have an obsession of Departure Zero. So we said at some point, we started sort of a transformation of ourselves operationally, and we said, "Let's focus on Departure Zero." So we took it up a notch, and we said, "One minute late is a late flight." So at the time, we started talking about excellence in execution, right?
And talking by the minute, we're talking about over here that it's a zero-tolerance minute for Departure Zero. And at the time, we set up targets that in those, and obviously, when you have a very good Departure Zero, you have a better Arrival 14, right? We took it in three pillars. These from say, every minute count, back in on the MPES. So we actually gave them purpose of what they did every day. And when you give purpose to your people, it's amazing what you can achieve. So purpose, it was the first thing. And then we said, the leaders must be close to the operation, closer to the operation. We set up, I would say, meetings for, or reviews, OTP, a governance for OTP, in which we review twice a day, the operation and how we're doing in each of them.
On those meetings, those meetings was all the high-level managers in those meetings, including myself, so that's, it's close to the operation. Middle managers, when they see the high-level managers that are all the time in these meetings, twice a day, obviously, they start understanding that those meetings are important, so you start actually modeling behaviors over there. And when you start modeling behaviors, you start building culture, right? The third one is, was, is for the next three months, six months. This one was problem-solving as we go. In every of these meetings that we had, at the beginning, these meetings were like maybe an hour and a half, lasted an hour and a half. Today is 15 minutes-20 minutes, we're done. That's it. We were solving small things in these meetings, and I give you an example.
It's one day we had to cancel a flight. I don't know if you know, but if you fly over the Amazon, in the plane, you have a jungle because the sugar was overdue, or how do you call it? It's not overdue. It was expired. So the sugar was expired. So in those meetings, we were like, "There must be some sugar that is not expired. Why don't we explore this, right?" And obviously, it was sugar that didn't expire. So I'm not saying it's... When I tell you these stories, it's not that we didn't do anything extraordinary about this. So it's ambitious goals, leaders close to the operation, building a machine of continuous improvement. Is everyone can do that, right? Everyone can have good ideas. The interesting thing here is that we built a culture of execution that is truly hard to replicate.
I think that became, in my mind, a strength, our competitors. Close to the operations, I mean, the best example is leaders close to the operation is myself becoming a pilot, for example, at the age of 50. I've been flying with LATAM for the last five months. That is close to the operation. When we talk about cost, our years in this company, all the years, we've been delivering an average of $130 million. You say, "Well, when is this gonna be over?" Efficiency that you can do. That is when we start looking forward, the enablers that we have: one, the first one is the flex, it's the flexible asset management. Roberto talked a little bit about this, and we're incorporating technology.
The first one, the flexible asset management, is the opportunity or the ability to move assets around among the countries where we operate. We operate, we have 10 different AOCs. In the U.S. or American carriers have one AOC, 10 different, anything that you can have. But we manage it to have this flexibility to can move around these assets across all the regions operate. The second one is that we have two MRO facilities. The one that we have in São Paulo is not only the largest, but it's a really state-of-the-art facility. I've been in many MRO facilities across the world, and the one, I'll tell you, this is one of the best hidden gems in Latin America, and it's not known because we do not do third-party work so far. What we have over here is we have the ability...
We're in terms of right now, we can actually have 80% of all the components on the A320 fam fleet. We can actually... We're talking about, we're insourcing all the Wi-Fi installation and so on and so forth. So it's really, really top-notch facilities that we have over there. Let me give you, we are what... The drone that you saw, for example, is part of the innovation that we have. That we've been using drones to inspect our aircraft for the last three years, and that's what it takes, you can inspect an aircraft in 70% less time than a human can do it, with 50% more accuracy and being much more of the aircraft. The last one that we did, that we launched, I think it was a month ago, right? That we announced it.
We partnered with Lufthansa Technik, and we implemented where you have the AeroShark project on your right-hand side, that is reducing 1% of fuel consumption. It's for. It's about $350,000 per aircraft, and this is, this is mimicking sort of the skin of a shark, actually, that what you have is when you fly, you have less drag on it, and it's, it's saving that type of, of fuel. We've been doing this fuel-saving things forever as well. It's been for the last 15 years, we implemented lean fuel, and we saved, all in all, we saved about 8% of the consumption that we had. Taking out the fleet, taking out all the fleet, all the new fleet incorporation, it was an. That we did in fuel.
So what we're doing right now, going forward as well, Roberto talked about it a little bit, and he's incorporating technology, but it's not incorporating technology. It's using the technology as an enabler to be more efficient. So what we're doing is we're digitalizing maintenance. We're actually changing the way maintenance is done around the world. I mean, they have different products, some different airlines have different products, but nobody has this sort of holistic approach in which we're working with agile teams, where we put aeronautical engineers, working with UX designers, working with data scientists, and we tell them, "You have this amount of money, go and solve this problem," and they're doing it. These are teams of about ten people, and they're actually doing it. On the left-hand side, you have aircraft system monitoring. This is what I...
is sort of my vision of having no AOGs. No AOGs is disruption for our passengers. No last-minute disruption. It could be because of weather, but I'm saying not of, not, not because of maintenance. We're far away from getting there. With the same-- With the things we're doing, is we are capturing maybe 20% of our total components of the aircraft, but at some point, we're gonna get to the 100%. So this is sort of a predictor. What you fi-- What you have on the right-hand side, the supply chain, is a forecaster. So depending on the, on, on the question you want to solve or, fight with them to get this, to get this funded. But we did it with the promise of an original business case of $78 million. We started the year $80 million.
Already identified that is gonna come in the next three years, and this is on a spend base of about $1.5 billion, so imagine the opportunities going forward when we apply this same methodology to the $5 million more that I have under my responsibility. Finally, safety, our core and most important value. We've been improving our, what we call, the risk in the last five years. We did by about 75%. It was based on what happened in the past, meaning that to apply safety or, or to learn, or to adjust procedures, is you need to have an event, you investigate that event, then you learn from that event, and then you adjust your processes, right? Not to come to the same conclusion, if you want, or to the same outcomes.
The capability that all the machines have for data analytics today. We're going from what it used to be sort of a reactive safety management to a proactive safety management. We're getting data from decision process. We're getting data from the weather forecast. We're getting all the data from the crew reports, and then we start finding patterns. The machine is finding patterns to predict risks that there are, but the ones that are closest. Imagine that we have an SOP. SOP as a standard operating procedures in terms of how we made the approaches to an airport, right? We do it the same way. We fly the same way in every country that we fly.
But with these tools, what we're actually doing is adjusting some operating procedures for different airports in terms of how the weather is affecting it, how the infrastructure is affecting it, and so on and so forth, won't happen. So in summary, operationally, we will keep on being the most punctual carrier of the world, with the most efficient cost, with safety as our core and most important value. Thank you.
Thank you, Hernán, our Chief Operating Officer, pilot, and now speaker at the New York Stock Exchange. Impressive. So thank you, everyone, for attending and joining us today in our Investor Day. Both of you that are here in person and the ones that are connected through the video conference, much appreciated, and I realize it has been a long morning with a lot of information, so I'll try to keep it interesting for you. I'm going to be sharing with you how we're seeing the rest of the 2024, so I'm going to share with you some figures for it. I'm also going to be sharing with you how we see our fleet plan, how we're seeing our growth potential for the coming years, and I'm going to share with you some targets for 2025 as we're seeing them today.
So let me start by putting a little bit of context of what Her and Roberto shared with us, some accomplishments of the past years. Just four years ago, we were operating 5% of our capacity. We had the borders of South America closed that made international travel impossible. And less than two years ago, we exited Chapter 11. And today, LATAM is operating more capacity than what we offer, transporting 7% more passengers. We're covering more destinations, and in addition to that, we're really performing financially.
We are at record levels of $2.8 billion EBITDA on the last 12 months, both improving our margins and having a leaner cost structure, as we have mentioned, and Roberto mentioned earlier. I'm going to double-click a little bit on that, on how we're seeing that for the future. You have been monitoring our numbers, and we have been deleveraging the company. Today, we're at 1.9x . We have guided this morning to further at this point. This financial structure allows us to capture opportunities as we see them, and that's what we have been doing, and that's why you have been seeing our market shares improving in the different regions that we operate. In addition to the operational performance and the financial performance, we have now been relisted in the New York Stock Exchange.
We have our sell-side coverage of the past 12 months, and today our trading liquidity is higher than what it was pre-pandemic. So the share price for... And today, LATAM is the second most traded stock in the Santiago Stock Exchange. Just a few months ago, when we got upgraded by our rating agencies, and we refinanced 2/3rds of our exit financing debt at half the cost of what it was financed previously. So a very important evolution for us. When we look at our operational performance, we look at our financial performance, and we look at these corporate events, if you want, we're seeing that both on an absolute basis and on a relative position, vis-à-vis our competitors, we're way ahead. Before sharing with you our growth plans, let's take a quick look to our fleet.
LATAM currently operates 340 aircraft. 263 of them are narrow bodies, and we operate almost 80 wide bodies currently. Our fleet is modern when you compare it to our U.S. peers, Delta, American, United. The value of that fleet, I often get asked the question of: What's the value of your unencumbered assets? On the fleet side only, it's a little north of $1.2 billion of fully unencumbered assets for LATAM Airlines. When we think about... You all have been hearing about supply chain issues, you're hearing about OEMs, you're hearing about engine manufacturers not being able to deliver, and that is something that we are in the industry.
We have seen OEMs cuts very difficult to find delivery slots before that, and we're seeing that the lessors are running out of capacity and space also to allocate leases, and we're seeing that consequence in the pricing. But that's not the situation of LATAM. At LATAM, we have secured a very important order book, 120 aircraft, that carries us through probably 2030 or maybe a little beyond, depending on how we see demand evolving. 80% of the order book comes from direct contracts with OEMs, contracts that have been renegotiated also during the Chapter 11. So when aircraft were escalating by very high inflation rates, in our case, those were frozen, and we renegotiated the terms of that, of those future deliveries.
All the deliveries that you're seeing, that we are receiving in the next years are state-of-the-art, new generation aircraft, either NEOs on the narrow-body side or 787-9s or 10s. We have that possibility in on the Boeing wide-body family. We are going to receive three additional aircraft for the remaining of 2024, so the lift for 2024 is completely guaranteed. And the numbers that you see here are the latest updates from the OEM. So those are deliveries, as I would say, for the first half of or nine months in 2025, are confirmed and have effective dates, and we have a lot of line of sight of those deliveries. We're expecting 222 aircraft in 2025, 20 of which are narrow-body aircraft and two that are wide-body aircraft.
With that, we believe that with the current demand environment that we're seeing, we're going to have the lift that we were forecasting, beginning of the year. We are also upgauging our fleet. The majority of the aircraft that we're going to be receiving on the narrow-body front are 321. That's 27% less fuel consumption, so it's a much more efficient fleet than what we used to operate. In 2025, we're expecting to operate 354 aircraft on average, and in 2026, we are expecting to receive 15 new aircraft, 13 of which are narrow bodies and 2 wide bodies, carrying us to an average fleet of 364 aircraft.
In terms of cost, and Roberto touched a little bit on this, but since it is so important to us, as the ones that have met me before, we always mention that at LATAM, we have two basic pillars from the financial side. One is cost, and the other is capital structure. And cost is very dear to our heart, and you just heard our CEO saying how extremely important it was to the company. The cost of fleet is. The fleet is the main asset where we operate, so the cost of fleet is really, really important to us. The year that we were expecting this year to round up around $900 million, and this is the total cash out for the whole fleet, for the 340 aircraft.
The market value of that cash out, if it were not, or if it wouldn't have been renegotiated during Chapter 11, would be one point. During the Chapter 11, and big concessions that we obtained from our financial counterparts at a very specific moment in time when it was very difficult. The question of, okay, you managed to renegotiate those prices during Chapter 11. Now, how locked in are those prices? So our lessors, all the contracts that were negotiated on the fleet and on the engine side, do not have termination clauses from the lessors. So 90% of those prices are locked in until 2029. So for the foreseeable future, towards the end of the decade, we have those prices locked in. Having said that, our fleet cash out will increase during the next years, as we are receiving more aircraft.
We're growing our fleet, as you've seen on the previous slide, and we're receiving state-of-the-art aircraft that are a little bit more expensive, so we are forecasting for 2025 to be a little south of $1 billion in total cash out of fleet for the 354 aircraft, and we're expecting to be south of $1.1 billion in 364 aircraft in 2026, so total cash cost of fleet is going to be in the next year, a very important competitive advantage vis-a-vis our competitors. Today, we're announcing a new guidance, and we issued guidance last December for 2024, a bit further, and we are extremely confident that we're going to be delivering these numbers end of year.
We are going to be growing between 15%- 16% in terms of ASK, despite the Brazil floodings that you are all aware, and the Porto Alegre situation. We're going to be growing within the range that we told the market. Our costs are going to be below what we anticipated. $0.043-$0.045, we're going to be a little below $0.042- $0.043, and that's basically a CASM of $0.067 or below, so very attractive cost structure, and Roberto mentioned it. He said in 2022, we had a passenger CASM ex-fuel of $0.042. That was 2022. In 2023, we had $0.042, and now I'm telling you, in 2024, we're going to have $0.042.
That's how much effort the company is doing in keeping our cost structure at line. And we're all very proud on the next line. We're going to be a $3 billion company in 2024. EBITDA of $3 billion, that's for EBITDA, the one we're used to. So we're targeting $3 billion-$3.15 billion for the EBITDA this year. And on the leverage side, I mentioned cost and capital structure as the two pillars for our company. We're going to be on the southern range, probably below 1.7x this year, towards the end of the year. So updating our guidance once again, third guidance we're giving in 2024. I'm very proud of the numbers you're seeing.
Growth, contained cost structure, improving margins and improving EBITDA, and lowering the leverage as the company is generating very consistently, you have seen before, right? It's the merit of the strategies, the merit of the networks, it's the merit of the value proposition that we give, and we provide our premium for all the employees that work day after day in LATAM. Let's look a little bit to the future. This was 2024 . We're almost ending 2024 . What we see in 2025 and 2026 . We have suffered, and we benefited from that, a big increment in demand and a big recovery from the pandemic levels. We grew a lot in 2023 , and we have grown a lot in 2024 . What we're forecasting for 2025 is to be growing on the high single digits.
We think, with our international presence, the aircraft we are, that we are receiving, we feel confident that the demand is there to target that growth for LATAM Airlines. And when we think a little bit more down the line, we're thinking more mid to high single digits for 2026 . And we are convinced that with our order book, we can deliver those numbers, and that our value proposition and our cost structure will allow us to grow that vis-a-vis our competitors in the region. An order book today, having an order book today, we have competitors that are struggling with the fleet. They're struggling financially, but they're also struggling with the fleet. So we feel extremely confident about these growth numbers that we're targeting for 2025 and 2026 .
In terms of costs, 50% of our business is the international business. So we operate 12 or 13 wide bodies. So our competition is mainly U.S. carriers and European carriers. And you see here how our cost structure compares with our competitors on 50% of our business. We have a value proposition that is better or at par of our competitors, and we're doing it with 40% less cost. And this is a merit, because LATAM was always a competitive company, but this is also a cost realignment that we benefited from on the Chapter 11, and that we are really showing you that year after year, we're committed to maintaining that cost structure in line and benefiting from that. So we have seen the gap widening vis-a-vis our competitors.
Back in pre-pandemic, the cargo operations cost. It's not that we're being less efficient in cargo, simply that our cargo business is growing. Since it's growing, when you divide it by ASK, you're basically dividing a larger number of business by a similar number of ASK, so you have an increase there. But it's simply that the CASM I just mentioned $0.042-$0.043 towards the end of this year for the total year. We're thinking in 2025 to keep it at bay between $0.042-$0.044. We feel extremely confident on the cost structure, and Ron touched on that. I think all the previous speakers touched a little bit on how in-depth we have that sentiment on cost through the company.
We're getting very good traction on direct sales penetration. We're getting very good traction on the digital transformation of the companies, the business simplification. We're insourcing what we think should be insourced, and Ron mentioned it, 80% of the components of the narrow-body family made in-house. We're retrofitting our aircraft in-house. That's a huge saving for us vis-à-vis the way we used to do it a few years ago. And on the fleet side, we keep improving with certain projects and the retrofits that we have been doing. The upgauging of the fleet, bringing the A321neo , so we consider an excellent aircraft, very cost competitive. We feel very happy with the aircraft and what we're seeing there. So the upgauging is also helping us maintain this cost structure going down the line.
In terms of EBITDA, I just mentioned $3 billion for 2024. That would be a 23% margin, EBITDA margin for us, improving from 19% pre-pandemic. So again, the company is growing and growing profitably. As we keep the cost structures as pay, and we're improving on the premium passenger side, we're seeing our passenger preference improving, Paulo touched on that, and our value proposition being very much perceived as differential vis-à-vis the other players in the region, and the cost containment merits that I just done touched upon. For 2025, billion dollars. The other angle for us that is very close to our heart is capital structure. Today, we have the lowest net leverage of a wide-body operator in the Americas. Better than United, better than Delta, certainly better than American.
So 1.9x is our current net leverage as of second quarter, and we just guided 1.6x- 1x . It's not that we target the specific metrics. Very similar to what Roberto explained in terms of market shares, is that we are convinced that this is a competitive advantage in this industry. We see it every day. We're seeing better terms from the source, from financial counterparts, from ground handling operations, from airports. We get better terms because we are a better credit. And in a moment where the industry is undergoing certain scarcity of engines or components or parts, you get allocated as a better credit, that last engine, or that last APU, or that last component, because you are a better credit than your competitor next door.
We are convinced that this is important, particularly in our region. Liquidity levels are extremely strong, $3.4 billion. Very important for me to highlight that recently, we renegotiated our revolving credit facility that is fully undrawn. That's $1.5 billion completely available to the company, that was increased to $1.5 billion, and also extended until 2029... Our liquidity levels represent 27% of the last twelve months' revenues. We recently did a refinancing, and we're very focused on shareholder value, and we're very focused on improving our net income. We're very focused on improving further our cash flow. That has been consistent throughout the quarters, and we're happy with the amount of debt that the company has.
That leverage of 1.7x seems reasonable to us in terms of the size of our company. But we're not happy with the cost of our debt. Our exit financing debt was expensive when we exited two years ago, and we refinanced 2/3rds of that debt last month, and we reduced the cost of that debt by almost half. So today, we're our interest expense for the exit financing debt has been reduced $120 million. So every morning when I wake up, I have $3.3 million more in my pocket. I feel very comfortable with that. We think that's a big progress for the company. But we have a little further to do. I mentioned we refinanced 2/3rds.
We still have 1/3rd that is callable in October 2025 , and the pro forma of those savings would be additional $38 million. So today, when you look at our company in terms of earnings per share, you see a very significant improvement in our net income for the next 12 months, and you're going to see a further step change after October of 2025 Very proud that the market is recognizing all the efforts, and we're seeing that in our interest rates now in billion dollars. Our cost of debt, now it's 8%. And going down the line, we have no maturities. Basically, we only have $270 million that mature in 2027.
A lot of flexibility when we're thinking about positioning and growing in certain airports and capturing sustainable growth, because once you capture that position, that's something that sticks for the next future. It's very important to be in this position. Strong capital structure, very low cost structure, and these maturities down the line, that gives us tons of flexibility. When we look a little bit further down the line, I just mentioned the $700 million, we can call them in October 2025, and we can call it in October 2026, the $1.4 billion. Maybe targeting an improvement in terms of cost, but certainly an improvement in terms of facing a little bit better that $1.4 billion. But certainly, a very comfortable situation from a financial perspective for LATAM Airlines.
We have never been in such a strong position from the financial side. And part of this is due because the company is generating very sustainable and consistent cash flow. When you look at our leverage, we are on the last 12 months, we're a little north of $800 million, and for 2025, we are targeting a levered free cash benefited by the savings I just showed you on the interest base. And the other part is the growth that we are forecasting and how we're seeing the full-year growth for the next premium passengers, as Paulo was mentioning, and having a contained cost base. We are still seeing pools for profitable growth. Again, we have a very strong cost structure.
We are able to cover destinations with good return on capital that our competitors are struggling to do, and we're seeing those openings, and we are going to continue to lower the interest expense of the company, as we can still call part of our exit financing debt. Of course, you have to think a little more about capital allocation, and we have been very rigorous on this, and we wanted to share our thoughts. The main focus is how to increase shareholder returns based on performance. We are paying the minimum dividend in Chile. In Chile, we are required to pay at least 30% of dividends of our net income legally, and we have paid the minimum so far.
But when we think about shareholder value, we also think about profitable growth, where we see pools of profitable growth, and we are seeing that. We have the possibility, as I was mentioning, to capture that growth, both on in terms of growth on the airline business, both growth on the loyalty business, where we see opportunities, but always committed to keep a fleet age of under 10 and to have as a target. And together with profitable growth, we think, again, it's very important, and it is a competitive advantage to keep a very strong balance sheet. And I'm sharing with you how the board is thinking a little about this. We are thinking that our metrics are very much in line of reaching a B B+ credit rating. We feel confident about it.
Our balance sheet, and we have this capital structure that then is better than our U.S. peers. We think focusing on shareholder value is the next. So how are we seeing 2025? We think that the company is going to be growing high single digits, as I mentioned before. We're thinking that the unit cost is going to be around $0.04.2-$0.04.4 . In terms of EBITDA, we're thinking that the EBITDA should grow more than what we grow in terms of ASK. We're going to be grow EBITDA more than what we're going to be growing ASKs, and we're convinced of that because of everything that we have been discussing, and because we see profitable growth pools in the different markets that we operate still for LATAM.
And the adjusted net leverage, provided that we don't change our dividend policy or that we don't find other mechanisms for shareholder value, is going to be certainly below 1.7x next year. So let me, let me wrap up with some few takeaways before we turn it to the Q&A. LATAM today is the 10th largest airline group in the world, certainly the first and most important leading airline in South America. For opportunities, and both Roberto and Paulo touched on this, tourists per capita are low. Our governments have difficulty to fund railways and highways in the region. The access to the key cities is by establishing airline connectivity and new airports. We believe our value proposition is unique in the region.
The experience we offer our customers, the importance and how the customers are perceiving that differentiating factor vis-à-vis other value propositions in the region is very key, and we're seeing it month after month. So we believe we are uniquely set with the unbundling of our rates, with the cabin segmentation that Paulo offered, uniquely set to capture premium demand in the region, and we are the only full-service carrier in the region today. We are the competitors that are domestic today. Players do not offer that. We are very focused on operational efficiency. We have the best-in-class MROs are not going to be driving savings for the next coming years. We just touched on MRO today and maintenance, but there's every area has the culture to generate ideas and initiatives on this front. And we're going to keep on growing.
We have financial growth opportunities in terms of fleet growth, upgauging our fleet, expanding our premium offerings to our customers. So we are very convinced that with our value proposition, with this cost structure, with this capital structure, and we're very focused on delivering strong returns to our shareholders, and we see that we can do that by growing profitably and maintaining a very strong balance sheet in the future years. Thank you so much. We're going to turn it to Q&A now.
Perfect. So thank you all to our presenters again. If you'll bear with us one moment, we're going to do a little bit of logistical changes to set up the four chairs here for the Q&A segment. Just as a reminder, for you, those of you that have connected via webcast, our webcast participants, you can submit your questions using the Ask a Question text located on the sidebar to the left of your screen, to display that, the timing. Okay, we have our mic check.
This one?
Okay, should we-
Oh, yeah. Should we use this one?
Yeah.
Okay. People in the front.
Thank you. This is Matt from Olympus Peak. Fuel prices have been volatile over the last 2-3 years. How do you manage this volatility with hedges, pricing, and the booking curve, and is there an optimal fuel price?
I'm happy to take that one. Thank you, Matt, for the question, and the way we think about hedging, we do hedge next four quarters. The way we think about hedging is that we look at our competitors, and we looked at how many of our ASKs portfolio are being hedged by our competitors and which are not. For instance, let me give you an example. If you look at our European competitors, they generally do hedge. Look at the U.S. carriers. The U.S. carriers do not hedge. So those are ASKs from American, United, Delta. We believe that there is fuel volatility going off of who hedges and who doesn't. Hedging policy that has been in place for the past since 2016, I would say.
It's reviewed by the board every beginning of the year. Minor adjustments have been made, and the way we structure the instruments themselves is generally by establishing a collar. It's an asymmetric collar, so if the fuel prices comes down, we pay some premium, but we benefit from the reduction of fuel prices, and we're covered asymmetrically more on the upper side, so think about asymmetric collars vis-à-vis the spot price going down the line in each of the quarters.
Perfect. Any other questions? Could we get a question here in-
What we've been seeing, the business has been trending really nicely, versus the published Q2 results. So I'd be curious to hear anything you can share on that business performance today.
Moment in the cycle of cargo, and the last half of 2023, first half of 2024, was paired with probably a demand that was not so strong. We have seen a change in that dynamic in the last few months. Exports from South America to the U.S. and to Europe, which are perishables, have been strong all along. Imports to South America, which is normally, finished goods, were in a weaker place, but that has actually changed in the last months, and that is paired together with. Yes, we see the flows today in a good place, and a capacity situation that is better on the balance than what we had in the first half of the year and the last half of 2023.
Thank you. We have a question in the front from Mike.
Thanks. Mike Linenberg, Deutsche Bank. Just, I guess, two questions here. To monetize its cargo business, your businesses are far bigger than that. Have you done sort of a, you know, run-by-run on sort of what you think the net asset value truly is at the company? Are we talking something north of $10 billion, given your slots, gates, infrastructure, your MRO business? I mean, what's that blue sky number, just to give us a sense of maybe the overall value?
We have counsel here, so they're going to be looking at what I say very closely. But there are some public numbers I can share with you. The loyalty program has an appraisal value of $5.6 billion. We have 48 million members, as we covered today. So when I compare it to the appraisals of other carriers in the world, I think there's still room for improvement on that appraisal, but that's the current public appraisal that is there. On the cargo side, we have a little north of $2.5 billion. This is valuation on December last year. So probably this December, when we update it, it's going to be better, as there is some offer that is being reviewed - difficult to assess, right? What's...
How important is our position where we have a 2.3x relative frequency share in São Paulo, the main airport in South America? There's not a specific value for that, but the network that LATAM has built throughout the years, with 60% market share in Chile, 65% in Peru, 40% in Brazil, it's really very difficult to replicate. So how much is that network worth and those lots, gates, and routes? There's no number in my mind at this point.
Okay. Great, and then just sort of building off of that, when we think about your ubiquity across the continent, across the region, you know, you're in the business of carrying cargo and carrying passengers from point A to B or on to C, and yet. But again, they're in a much more competitive and contested U.S. market. In your part of the world, I mean, you had it on one of your slides, you carry, what? One of almost every. You know, the cargo, the MRO business right now, you know, it's a gem in the LATAM empire, and yet it's only your own maintenance business, you know, maybe an opportunity to do third party. Can you talk about maybe some of the teams, whether it's opening up, you know, maintenance to doing more third party?
Because I feel like, you know, the infrastructure's there, the platform's there, in a part of the world where I think for most other carriers, their resources are constrained. It seems like you have that unique opportunity. Thanks for taking my questions.
Thanks, Mike. I agree. I mean, again, when I mentioned something like 6% of the e-commerce in Latin America going through us, we have a billion visits on our website per year, billion. 250 million different IPs actually connect on our digital channels every year. So, I think that there's a ton of opportunity. I feel that the moment is right from where you ended up, if you want the recovery from the pandemic and setting up the organization again and the capacity, and making sure that you did that right, which wasn't easy. But I do agree with you that I think that the ability that we have to monetize our size goes beyond simply just adding additional flights. So we'll probably talk about that more in the future.
Yeah, please, go ahead, Steve.
Oh, thank you, Tori, and good afternoon, everybody. Steve Trent from Citi. Thank you very much for the presentation. Very informative. Just two questions from me. Versus the United States, but when you look at the differences in some of the Latin markets, flying is less affordable per capita than it is here. Oh, how do you think these Latin markets start to bridge the difference? High net worth travel or more capacity coming in, just would love-
High net worth individuals, or let's say, middle, upper class, people that have fly more and is flying more than in the past. And I think that's a... And if you look at the economic split within-- I mean, let me give you a-
the example of Chile. Today, 70% of Chile is middle class, and less than 10%, around 10% is poverty or are considered poor people. 25 years ago, that was 30% middle class and 40% poor people. Evolution of the country is going to be extremely important. Travel has become extremely affordable vis-à-vis what it was 20 years ago. We have. I don't have much doubt that the potential for growth is there. It's always paired to the growth of the economies, but on top of that, the need for travel, for air travel in the region, because of the geography, because of all the other constraints, I think is very clear that we'll have a good impulse going forward.
I complement one thing. I'll just add something quickly. I think also our value proposition has a combination of choice. So, you know, we have a segment that we cater to, which is we call Basic Economy, where people can buy more affordable fares all the way up to Premium Business. So at the end of the day, the business is tailored to capture any opportunity of demand that we can see in any of the markets, and they will move at different paces sometimes.
Thank you very much. And just one quick follow-up, if I may. I was definitely intrigued by what you said about next year's SAF. Would you happen to remember off the top of your head, maybe this is one for you, Ramiro, off the top of your head, what you're assuming in terms of U.S. dollar, off the top of your head?
Yeah, BRL, I think we're going to be releasing guidance in detail in December. BRL would be probably in line with the current forwards that we're seeing, which are BRL 5.4. Chilean pesos is around CLP 950, but we will be releasing that information when we finally release our complete guidance during December.
Oh, great. Thank you.
You didn't ask about fuel, which I appreciate.
Yeah. Yeah, we have a question there in the back. Thank you.
Hi, Pablo Monsivais from Barclays. Thanks for taking my question. I would like also predicated on a better competitive position for you. Thank you.
I mean, I think we're all seeing what's going on with the industry in Brazil. It's very hard to predict at this point in time, I think, what will happen. But we focus on ourselves. I mean, we will see what happens there, and but I think that what's important is our ability on what we have shown here that we can do in the market. We have been able to grow the A320. We have the capability of continuing to just make our network, our position, even better than the one we have today.
Thank you. Jens Spiess from Morgan Stanley. I have a question regarding... I want to square the fundamental growth you're seeing for the region versus your order book for your fleet. Obviously, you cannot anticipate any delays, but what has you most worried? Is it your narrow body, like, order book, your wide body order book, and also, yeah-
Turn the question of pilots to Hernán, just to address the order book. I feel very confident on the narrow body side. I think we have a very clear plan; it is something that they will be delivering in time. Boeing, it's a little bit more concerning. We do think that Boeing will come out, but I would say that those two wide bodies is something that generates a little bit more uncertainty. And on the engine side, little impact from the rest of the engines. I would say the most concerning one is Rolls for the 787-9s. That's something that has a lot of focus from-
If you want as well, that within a region, you don't need 1,500 hours to get on an airliner. So across 500 in Brazil, we can have this flexibility as well of moving around some pilots. Obviously, not all of them, but some of them we can. And we are working. We are anticipating sort of the future in terms of putting in place flight schools that work with us to produce more pilots and to could be financing them. And we're thinking about sort of how we do it going forward, but I don't see any problem in the next two years.
Thank you. So actually, on a related note, we have a question from the webcast that is probably for you, Hernán. With regard to the context of engine turnaround times in-
-years. I like to fly inventories by the cap generating opportunity that we have. We anticipated what was coming, and we think we are... I mean, we are prepared for that is doing, or everybody is doing. Today, we have one AOG on the 787 fleet. We have six AOGs on the 320 fleet. On the 320 fleet, there's 450 across the globe, and on the 787 , it's about 23 or so, depending on the day that you ask the question. But I think we'll cover...
I mean, I think that Ramiro says that we're confident about the growth going forward because we already have the planes over there, and we have the flexibility on, and the ability of extending the life of those planes that we were returning by doing sort of maintenance program that is called ECG One, ECG Two, that we're looking at, to make sure that we have the fleet available for the growth that we want to attain.
... I think on increasing inventories, we were seeing that that components would be an issue and inventories would be an issue, so we allocated some working capital to that. And yes, we also bought some additional spare engines on the different families to have a little bit more buffer. We were not anticipating the magnitude that we're seeing today in the industry and the impact that it is causing, but it gives us a little bit of comfort that together with the extension of the life of the aircraft, we're very confident on what we have flown in 2024. That you have seen we actually have flown what we were anticipating, despite all the disruptions, and extremely confident on 2025.
I think we talked about, you know, when we say the value proposition and the focus that we have. We clearly are making sure that we put the resources behind what our customer... We have the lounges that are coming up. We do a lot of soft improvements in terms of catering and services in general. There's a huge push for technology. You know, Roberto alluded that a few times, in terms of improving, so that if something happens, we are also better prepared, you know, to interact with our customer and find solutions. You know, contingencies are part of our day-to-day, because of things outside of our control.
So we just need to make sure that we are very, very in tune to that and make and position the business to react when customers need us. And I think that's about it.
Yeah.
Let me just want to complement with something that has been repeated, but I think is really important. I mean, you know, our customers put their time in our hands, and they want to make sure that they can get wherever they need to get safely, quickly. We continue to be that dependable airline that we are today. Every time I feel that the customers have more voice. I used to receive no emails from customers and complaints. Now, I receive a few a week, and I don't think that that's related to operation. Actually, it's better. It's just that our customers are today expecting more, demanding more, wanting to make sure that you are concentrated on what they expect from you. So that, that's a key thing, and doesn't matter if it's we focus there, the impact is well seen.
Thank you very much. A question here in the front.
Christine, LATAM has had amazing operational performance on basically every metric: revenues, EBITDA, free cash flow generation. You consistently beat and raise guidance, and yet LATAM used to trade at a 7x EBITDA multiple, and what can we do to unlock value?
I think we have to ask investors what they're thinking. But, no, I think that there's one important thought here, which is, you know, we do understand very clearly at the end of the day, fair price is an act of, and investing in LATAM is an act of confidence in what we're doing. And I think our responsibility today is just keep on showing that track record that you see there, making sure that, you know, after these four very complex years in an industry that was extremely battered, I don't think it's unfair to say, "Hold on, let me understand you guys again. It was tough. Give me some breathing room. Let me see how you perform." So for me, our task here as management is to continue delivering those results, creating that-
Thank you. Any other questions in person?
Can I just maybe comment on... It's a sort of industry-wide. We have had some very good years, right? And the tide was rising for all the companies. And suddenly, I think, more between companies. There are companies performing really well and others that are struggling. So it's not just in the neighborhood overall. It's deciding which is the best asset to allocate resources. And I think it's tougher, right? When the rising tide is for everyone, it's simpler. When you have to invest resources on understanding the different quality and the different metrics of each of the companies, it's a little bit more challenging to see where value is.
Okay. Mike Lindenberg, Deutsche Bank again. Just, on the fleet, and as you sort of think about the opportunities going forward, your smallest single-aisle right now, are they fragmented? And so on one hand, is there, you know, an interest or maybe studies underway about looking at smaller gauge airplanes? There's a lot of smaller markets, that I think ultimately will fit nicely in your network. And then, on the other hand, when I look at your fleet plan going forward, you know, each year you're just getting a couple of 787s , and sometimes it takes two 787s to just do one deal. Is there a desire to look in the A321 Neo family, maybe at the LR or XLR, since I'm sure you have those substitutions, right?
So, fleet question, both on, you know, small short haul and kind of medium to longer haul. Thanks.
So let me, let me take it first. So important that you mentioned the XLR. We have XLRs coming, okay? So from 2027 onwards, we'll receive more than a dozen of them. So that will actually help us grow what we consider is our long-haul network. Of course, with narrow bodies, and it gives from some airports, from Lima, for example, a great ability to basically fly everywhere in the U.S. on a single hub. So that's already in our fleet plan. It's not distinguished there in the 321s, but we already have XLRs. With respect to the smaller gauge, we always look at opportunities and everything. I think it needs to be right for the network.
And the way we have developed the network in the last two or three years, we're very comfortable. We still have a number of 319s that are performing well, so we have the gauge today, even though we do understand that it's older technology and, at some point in time, they go away. We have 40 of those, so they serve today the purpose of giving capillarity to the network in a nice way. But yeah, we're always open to looking at this, and if we believe that any other component of the fleet makes sense for our network, of course, we'll study it, and eventually we'll see.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. We'll do one other one. It's a brief one from the webcast, but that's Polaris Capital. He says: "Can you please explain what is the remaining $270 million of debt maturing in 2027? We were under the impression that the entirety of the term loan-
I'll let Andrés take it. I know it's the staff, but I think it's good you meet the rest of the management.
Sure. Thank you. Andres Bianchi here. Yeah, that's part of the capital facility, which is now, I think, fully drawn, that expires in 2027 . That's the piece which is now characterized by hedges. You know, currently, we have, it's been renegotiated, but that's one which is, of course, subject to being renewed going forward. But that's the original maturity now, extended to 2027 , which is being refinanced as we speak.
Thank you very much. I saw another question in the back in person.
Yes, into the guidance questions. I would love to also hear your views in which segment and geographies are you seeing outperforming your expected corporate market, maybe in Brazil and Chile? Some additional color will be great. Thank you.
So, more than outperforming expectations, maybe let me just cover this year, it was a little bit delayed, so that's why we're growing kind of 20% on the international business, and it has come, I guess, to the post. Today, for us, corporate, corporate is around 100% of pre-pandemic, so it fully recovered in our mind. And leisure is in the high 110%, 120%- 125% of pre-pandemic levels. Brazil is just over 100%. Chile is 110%. So domestic recovered faster, sits around 110% after this last year of recovery. Corporate is in a good place. I don't think that we have seen losing flows from whether, you know, Zoom or what, travel.
And not only because you say people go for conventions and events, and then I fly back. That would have been impossible without Zoom before. That guy flew; he would have not flown 10, five years ago. You see? So, I think that after the four years of pandemonium we had, today, I'm pretty happy with where the demand is in pretty much every segment, whether it's on a geographical basis or a type of passenger basis.
Thank you. Another question from the webcast, from Guilherme Mendes, from JP Morgan, who, first of all, congrats on the presentation, and it's a two-part question. So the first part is: How do you see the international competition, and is there any concern on international yields due to the increasing capacity?
So I think that, I mean, we've seen a recovery in international capacity this year on pretty much every flow, ours and our competitors. And honestly, demand has stayed strong, and yields have stayed stable. I think that the place one is a good one. I think that our cost structure, in part, is a great advantage when you consider not only the long haul, you know, international within South America, that's where we have more or less 40% of the traffic that you saw a little bit earlier. And our cost structure, together with our network presence, allows us to compete very, very effectively vis-à-vis ULCCs in the region. I don't think that we have missed a bit with respect to how to compete in South America. We feel very comfortable about our position and that.
We'll see how demand moves forward. Again, it always comes back in my mind to this, maybe things are great next year, and we'll profit from that. If there's a hiccup, if there's something in the Middle East, whatever, at the end of the day, the question I ask myself is, I can't predict that, I can't do anything about it. What can I do myself? I have to be agile, very quick. That percentage of variable cost that I told you, my last marginal capacity is key, but I have this relative advantage on where my competitors are gonna have to make harder decisions before me.
Would you expect consolidation in any of the domestic markets that you operate in? And would LATAM consider an acquisition?
I guess we'll observe the market, and we'll see what happens, and in terms of LATAM, we're always, you know, we're always. I mean, it's our job just to make sure that we scan every opportunity, increasing our profitability and increasing shareholder returns. So we're prepared.
Thank you. One additional question from the webcast, and then I will turn it back to in-person. But with regard to the outlook that we talked about in the presentations, what are the main risks that the company could be facing in 2025 that could change the outlook, and how would you be prepared to handle them?
Again, I mean, this industry, and the important question for me is: How do we prepare for managing those external factors? And I think that we are in a good place to do that. So I think that we have the company or the group in a great place to manage that. Of course, I worry about volatility of oil and the situation in Middle East. I think that's a concern, but I come back, and I'm sorry that I'm repeating this, I come back just to the point that, you know, sometimes maybe a little bit of a crisis will be an opportunity for LATAM. One of the key takeaways I'd like you guys to take over after this meeting.
Thank you very much. I think there was a hand raised last time. Perfect. Thank you.
Polaris Capital. Just a few questions. The first is, on the debt, I know you prepaid the restructuring cost, so there's no cash out. But the maturity, the $1.4 billion maturity, if you do anything with that, are you anticipating any additional costs to refinance that,
... So we can call it in October 2026, with 50% of the-
$1.5 billion.
No, no, the $1.4 billion, I understand, is the question.
$1.4 billion .
Sorry?
$1.4 billion .
$1.4 billion. We can call it, we can call it in October 2026. It's too early to say if we're going to be addressing that at that point or not. We're going to be monitoring the market, to assess it, but that would be the cost if we decide to call it in October 2026.
Yes, thanks. Second question is on the $1.3 billion-$1.4 billion cost saves that you've made. If you reflect back on what you cut, the cost that you cut and what your level of service is today or your goals, are there any costs that you would think you might have to reinvest back to kind of bring back that? And likewise, when you compare your costs and quality of service relative to your competitors, is there any cost that you might want to reinvest in to kind of upgrade to be better competitive?
Yeah. Paulo always asks for more investment and more cost. But the one-
Sometimes I want to spend the money.
So, the one. Let me explain it, and then I'll turn it a little bit to Paulo to see where-
Yeah
... where he sees a little more points of investment. But the $1.3 billion, coming from fleet, and those prices are locked in for the foreseeable future. The other third was mainly wages and benefits. So, agreements, we reduced the fixed payment and increased the variable. We obtained certain operational efficiencies that Hernán can detail in extensive detail during launch, that those are already locked in in the union agreements and that generate savings within more than a thousand contracts, ex fleet, ex engines, during the Chapter 11. So that's locked in. I don't anticipate any cost. I think that when we measure actually the cost savings, they are beyond the $1.3 billion, and we have been investing in lounges. We have been investing further on the retrofit of the narrow bodies and wide bodies.
We have prevented the retirement of the fleet, and therefore retrofitted more aircraft than we were anticipating. We have now Wi-Fi in the different countries. Originally, it was only Brazil. So I think there was a lot of investment. Paulo is going to say that not enough, but plenty of investment, and that was absorbed by additional saving initiatives that were beyond the $1.3 billion that we made public to the market.
Thanks.
What I would say first is we're extremely proud of the recommendation levels that we have in the region. We're by far the most recommended airline, especially when we talk about the premium segment, premium traveler segment. But when we look at overall, we showed a number here of 54 for our NPS. Those are results that are very, very good for the segment, for the industry in general. There is a lot of focus every day on big projects, small projects, with this mindset. Very simple example, you know, we kept improving what we do, what the customer sees on the day-to-day, and we keep focusing on things that they don't see, as a way to offset some of that investment. So we've changed, for example, the way that we load catering in our planes.
Every time, you know, the catering truck touches the aircraft, it's a cost. So we've found a different way of doing it, and that generates something differently for us. We've been investing in the, in technology, in terms of the customer care and the pilot that we're doing with AWS to use, you know, better GenAI advancements to lower the cost of serving that customer. And again, that generates savings that we can think about if we need to reinvest some of that or not. On the hard, significant on the horizon.
I mean, and just to complement this, and I think it's important vis-a-vis what I said. Today, LATAM's product delivery is a good one, and I think it's the adequate one for the region and for the type of customers that travel with us. Of course, we will always look at improvements in our passenger experience, but I go back to what I said before. I think now it's more about the attitude, the software, I call it, the technology, and I think that we have performed most of the significant investments we need to make on the hardware, on the investment side, to have a product that I think is top quality for the region and clearly high first quartile in the world.
So no, I think that we found this spot I like a lot, which is cost that is competitive to anybody, anywhere, in a product that is far, far better than most of the people that fly today.
Last question is on Argentina. I know you're still mopping up some privatization in that market. I'd be just curious about your thoughts and observations about that.
So of course, we're observing what's going on in Argentina. Argentina is an important market for LATAM. We are today the second largest international operator to Argentina. We have almost 40 flights a day. We carry as many passengers as the leader in terms of international traffic. So we have had, and have today, a very important presence in Argentina, and all of our three hubs are sourced by a ton of Argentines, not only from Buenos Aires, but also from the interior of the country. Of course, we're tracking what's going on in Argentina, and we'll see what happens. At this point in time, I think that the changes that are happening in the industry are good for the country, for Argentina itself. But I guess, as everybody, we're observing how this develops going forward.
For the time being, if we find opportunities of increasing our connectivity from Argentina to the world, we'll keep on expanding them as we did in 2024.
... Perfect. One other question from the webcast, from Lucas Marquiori from BTG, who wants to know: Would it make sense for LATAM to increase its regional jets in some markets, especially in Brazil, where regional aviation is going to be incentivized by the government's tax reform?
I think I already kind of answered this in terms of we already have a number of aircraft that have what that means, so we'll track it as well. I will see, but for the time being, we explore everything, and we're comfortable with what we have. But if there's an opportunity for it, of course, we're always looking.
Perfect. There's a second part to that, which is: Do you expect to continue to gain market share in important hubs like Guarulhos, especially as key rivals like GOL and Azul are in talks for a potential merger? Does the incremental capacity-
This industry to identify where you can win, and so many people fight fights that they cannot win, so instead of talking about specific airports, where is it that our product, our network, our frequent flyer program, our customer experience makes it that we can win? And I think that we've proven over this last year that we can identify those pockets of value very, very clearly and act fast upon them. We're very comfortable with the situation we have today in Guarulhos, to give our passengers and our partners the best connectivity that can be given on that very important market. Of course, I come back again to my relative advantage. If I see an opportunity that makes sense, we'll be fast, working on it.
Perfect. I think we have time for about one other question. I saw there was a hand up in the audience towards the back. I'm not sure if there's any other questions here in person. We could take maybe one last one.
Thanks. Paulina Alcántara of AllianceBernstein. Just one quick question for you. Do you expect to benefit at all from Brazil's National Civil Aviation Fund? And if so, could you please elaborate whether you expect that to benefit you or hurt you in any way?
So just to give context of this question for people that don't know, there's a law that has been passed. The regulation has not been done, in terms of using something called the Fundo Nacional de Aviação Civil, so aviation, Civil Aviation Fund, to provide financing, eventually help for the industry, but for many, many other things as well. One of the things that that fund can do, actually, is finance SAF projects. And if you ask me, where I think is the best use of public resources at this point in time to help the industry, other than infrastructure that I think is lacking, particularly on secondary airports in Brazil, is speeding up the possibility of producing SAF at competitive prices in the country that has probably the biggest potential in the world of producing SAF.
I think that from a public policy perspective, that would be, in my opinion, the most intelligent or the best idea in terms of how to potentially use that fund.
Perfect. Well, then a big thank you again to our presenters and for the Q&A today. I'd like to turn it back over to Roberto for any final closing remarks.
So thanks again for being here and for spending time. I hope we didn't bore you too much, and I hope that you enjoyed just as much as we have today on this very special occasion where we're back to the New York Stock Exchange, for the next 25 years, for sure. If I just can give you a final reflection, you know, again, what I told you in the beginning, I think that we are one of the very few groups of airlines that can say that have, you know, tangible control over their own destiny. That's not an easy thing to say to this industry. I don't think that many can say that. And it all comes down to what we have done in this last four, five years.
You know, great footprint, strong financials, taking care of our customers, making sure that we are dependable, ready to take the opportunities. If I can leave you with one last thought, at the end of the day, what matters is the results, and the results have shown, I think, that what we very much spent time and suffered over these last four or five years, tough times, is paying back. I'm very, very proud of the team, of the 38,000 employees that support LATAM every day. They are the heart, and particular thanks to each one of them. Again, thanks to you for being here.
So thank you all for joining, those that joined via webcast, and a special thanks to those of you that are here in person. We truly appreciate everyone's presence today. If you have any other follow-up questions that there may have been, feel free to reach out to the IR team. We're here to help. We will now take about a 10-minute break for those that are in person, to prepare for the luncheon setup, and we do encourage you again to take advantage of this time with management, mingle, and interact-