Turkish Airlines SWOT: a recent pattern of falling quarterly profits, but many strategic strengths

Benefiting both from a large and growing home market and from its strategy to increase transfer traffic, Turkish Airlines (THY) continues to achieve double digit growth in traffic and revenues. Nevertheless, THY reported a year on year drop in its operating profit in 2Q2014 for the fourth successive quarter (although net profit increased due to non-operating items). It was also the fifth successive quarter to suffer a fall in unit revenue (RASK, expressed in USc).

Although it has an efficient cost structure by FSC standards, it has struggled in recent quarters to lower CASK enough to offset downward pressure on RASK. In this report, we put THY's recent quarterly results performance into a more strategic perspective by looking at its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.