The British low-cost airline Easyjet is planning another large order from the European aircraft manufacturer Airbus. According to Easyjet boss Johan Lundgren, the company wants to buy 157 aircraft from the Airbus A320neo series to enable further growth and replace older aircraft. The shareholders still have to approve the decision for the order. Easyjet founder Stelios Haji-Ioannou is critical of excessive expansion, but he only owns four percent of the shares.
Together with an existing order, Easyjet has now ordered 315 additional aircraft, which are to be delivered by 2034. The airline has not only decided to take on more aircraft, but also larger ones: on average, the aircraft will be able to accommodate more than 200 passengers in the future, as the airline is changing an existing order and converting 30 A320neos into the significantly larger A321neos.
Easyjet is the leading European low-cost airline after Ryanair and Wizz Air – in Germany it once took over parts of Air Berlin, but has now significantly reduced flights from the capital and also withdrawn from the German domestic market. Unlike Ryanair and Wizz Air, Easyjet primarily flies from expensive major airports and thus wants to be attractive to business travelers. However, this also means that it has higher costs and did not achieve similar profit margins as its two competitors.
But the airline is now benefiting from the current boom in demand and, according to preliminary figures for the 2023 financial year, has achieved a pre-tax profit of £460 million – the company has not yet provided any information on sales. The second half of the year was the best in the company’s history, said Lundgren. The prospects for the winter are good: Easyjet wants to grow by 15 percent and still expects higher prices with the same level of aircraft utilization. In the future, the airline is aiming for a profit of seven to ten pounds per passenger, compared to the less than five pounds it currently achieves. Shareholders are to receive a dividend for the first time since the corona pandemic.