Abra Group CEO, Adrian Neuhauser at the Airline Leader Summit Latin & Caribbean 2025

Transcript

Adrian Neuhauser:It's obviously interesting, right? Given shifts in currency, given shifts in immigration regulations, and really just overall economic mood, we are seeing shifts across the network. But overall, demand is holding up really well. Right. So, so we've, we've shifted some capacity between the US and our, and our domestic networks in, in South America. That's worked very well for us. We're seeing more and more demand between Europe and South America, which is working really well for us. So on the Avianca network, and if you see our numbers, loads have been going up as we sort of adjust our, our, our network to where we see the demand. The reality is the Latin American demand is holding up really, really well through this cycle. GOL is benefiting from that as well and from sort of the flexibility that we have to move things around. But interestingly, as we've seen some patterns where international flying from Brazil has softened a little bit, domestic flying has come in to substitute that. And there's a lot of internal domestic tourism that's happening. And GOL is sort of uniquely suited to service that. It has of the major Brazilian carriers, the most domestic network, right? So that's been holding up really well for the airline as well. Airlines are exposed to every single bit of geopolitical issue that you can think of, right? Whether it's currencies, whether it's fuel, whether it's tariffs, whether it's simply, you know, disputes between countries, right? That ultimately— so one of the interesting things that we think we achieve with this broader network is the ability to move capacity and demand around, to, to shift flying from one of our networks to another and really to interconnect them in a way that allows us to balance that. That's been working. That's been working well. And again, domestic Brazil is performing very well. We're seeing deliveries on the narrowbody, on the narrowbody side sort of start to align much more to calendars. And I think if you talk to most carriers in terms of the supply chain issues of narrowbody deliveries, supply and demand are starting to align much better on that side, right? You continue to have a lot of AOGs driven mostly by the engine issues, especially, you know, the new generation engines on both NEOs and MAXs. But again, production is is starting to get to where it needs to be and those planes are delivering better. Widebodies, we still have a while to catch up. We are big believers in, in, in that there's, you know, excess demand for widebody flying for a while yet. Right. Our investment in Wamos is a, a reflection of that. Right. When we looked at our portfolio as Avro, we believed we were underweight widebody exposure. And, you know, one, one way of fixing that would have been a big order and, you know, a lot of, a lot of years. And another one was, was this, this, you know, we think jewel of an asset that we found in WAMS. It's been a great addition to us and it's performing very, very well. So we think there's, there's still a lot to run on that. This is ultimately the biggest question. We see demand continuing to grow pretty strongly in Latin America. And, you know, we're in a unique position in that we have the strongest order book of any airline in, in South America. Right. Between, between the order book and Avianca, the order book goal. We have, we have, you know, we could grow our fleet by 70% just by— so we have an order book that allows us to, and at the same time we have staggered leases that allow us to roll off our existing capacity, right? So we have a lot of room to adjust our growth, but we're also in a unique position where we can be a driver of that. I think we're seeing our competitors be pretty rational and And we've been doing the same, right? And hopefully that, that's the environment that, that, that remains. Great.

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