Japan Airlines Co (JAL) expects a worse loss this fiscal year than previously forecast as the COVID-19 pandemic wreaks havoc on international demand for travel.
The nation’s flag carrier is now forecasting a net loss of ¥300 billion (US$2.9 billion) for the 12 months ending on March 31 and sales of ¥460 billion, according to an exchange filing yesterday.
For the third quarter, JAL reported a net loss of ¥51.5 billion, wider than the ¥36.9 billion estimated by analysts. Sales for the period were ¥161.8 billion versus the ¥170 billion forecast.
Photo: AFP
Airlines in Japan are facing a grim outlook as COVID-19 cases rise and the nation extends its state of emergency. Surging virus numbers in Asia’s second-biggest economy could have limited JAL’s traffic in the third quarter of last year to just 27 percent of pre-pandemic levels, Bloomberg Intelligence analysts said last month.
Japan is also still yet to reach a conclusion on whether to go ahead with the Olympics later this year.
While Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, and the Japanese government are pledging to forge ahead, a Japan Broadcasting Corp poll showed that almost 80 percent of people think the Games should be canceled or postponed.
The nation’s other big airline, ANA Holdings Inc, on Friday reported a quarterly operating loss that was slightly narrower than analysts’ estimates. ANA’s pledge to get back into the black next fiscal year looks challenging considering the pandemic shows no sign of abating.
Separately, Ryanair Holdings PLC said it is betting on a rapid rollout of coronavirus vaccines to deliver a late-summer travel surge after forecasting losses of up to 950 million euros (US$1.1 billion) in the year through next month.
While a resurgence of COVID-19 cases in Europe means Easter is “essentially a writeoff,” the passenger tally might recover to 50 to 70 percent of normal levels in the peak months of July, August and September as more people get the jab, chief executive officer Michael O’Leary said in an interview yesterday.
“You’re going to see a dramatically accelerated rate of vaccination across the European Union,” O’Leary said. “That’s the point where we are released from these restrictions. Short-haul travel will recover strongly and quickly. There is huge suppressed travel demand in Europe.”
Europe’s biggest discount airline expects to carry as few as 26 million people in the current 12 months compared with 149 million in fiscal 2020 as the emergence of new coronavirus variants drives further spikes in case numbers.
Governments have responded with tougher rules and told citizens that it is premature to book summer holidays.
This time was supposed to be different. The memorychip sector, famous for its boom-and-bust cycles, had changed its ways. A combination of more disciplined management and new markets for its products — including 5G technology and cloud services — would ensure that companies delivered more predictable earnings. Yet, less than a year after memory companies made such pronouncements, the US$160 billion industry is suffering one of its worst routs ever. There is a glut of the chips sitting in warehouses, customers are cutting orders and product prices have plunged. “The chip industry thought that suppliers were going to have better control,” said
Enimmune Corp (安特羅生技) has obtained marketing approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its EnVAX-A71 vaccine for enterovirus 71 (EV-71), becoming the nation’s first enterovirus vaccine completely made in Taiwan, it said yesterday. After spending 13 years and NT$1.5 billion (US$49.77 million) on the research and development of the vaccine, Enimmune plans to start manufacturing and marketing it by the end of March, the company said in a statement, without disclosing customer order figures. “It is possible that the vaccine would not be included in a national vaccination program initially, and consumers would need to pay for it themselves,” parent
Vaccine skeptics blocking transfusions for life-saving surgeries, Facebook groups inciting violence against doctors and a global search for unvaccinated donors — COVID-19 misinformation has bred a so-called “pure blood” movement. The movement spins anti-vaccine narratives focused on unfounded claims that receiving blood from people inoculated against COVID-19 “contaminates” the body. Some have advocated for blood banks that draw from “pure” unvaccinated people, while medics in North America say they have fielded requests from people demanding transfusions from donors who have not received a vaccine. In closed social media groups, vaccine skeptics — who brand themselves as “pure bloods” — promote violence against doctors
Asteroid mining start-up AstroForge Inc is planning to launch its first two missions to space this year as it seeks to extract and refine metals from deep space. The first launch, scheduled for April, is to test AstroForge’s technique for refining platinum from a sample of asteroid-like material. The second, planned for October, would scout for an asteroid near Earth to mine. The missions are part of AstroForge’s goal of refining platinum-group metals from asteroids, with the aim of bringing down the cost of mining these metals. It also hopes to reduce the massive amount of carbon emissions that stem from mining