- Friday, June 06, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
INDIA’S biggest airline IndiGo expects its revenue to recover from April as demand for travel has shown signs of recovery, its chief executive officer (CEO) Ronojoy Dutta said on Friday (4) after the carrier saw its first quarterly profit in two years.
Airlines which have been heavily hit by the coronavirus pandemic since 2020 were seeing signs of recovery of late when the Omicron variant posed a new challenge.
According to Dutta, IndiGo’s bookings plummeted after December 15 as India imposed curbs amid the freshly surging infections, Reuters reported.
And after travel is gradually returning due to pent-up demand, the airline CEO expects that the revenue will continue to be low in the January-March quarter before recovering in the first quarter of 2022-23.
“The worst has come and gone, things are slowly getting better. At least we can say for sure they are not getting worse,” Dutta told analysts over a call, the news outlet said.
IndiGo parent Interglobe Aviation, which operates IndiGo, reported a net profit of Rupees 1.28 billion (£12.6 million) in the three months to December 31, compared with a loss of Rupees 6.27 billion (£61.7 million) a year ago.
According to the company which is headquartered in Gurugram in the northern state of Haryana, revenue from operations nearly doubled to Rupees 92.95 billion (£915 million) from what it was a year ago. According to Dutta, it has already exceeded the levels that were seen in the pre-pandemic times.
Yields, a metric for profitability, grew 19.2 per cent to Rupees 4.41 (£0.043) compared with the previous quarter, despite a 186 per cent rise in fuel prices over the same period, Reuters reported, adding the passenger load factor or the passenger carrying capacity being used, rose to 80 per cent during the quarter.
The airline expects to deploy 10-15 per cent per cent lower capacity in the fourth quarter, compared with the previous one, as bookings gradually grow.
Dutta said the profits were also helped by stronger yields on international flights that were limited in number but saw strong traffic that ended up in higher margins.
He was also hopeful that the Indian government will soon ease restrictions on international travel.
