airBaltic President & CEO, Martin Gauss, at the CAPA Airline Leader Summit 2023

Transcript

Martin Gauss:A very strong start finally. So getting out of the crisis and a strong first quarter here. And it looks like we are finally getting— leaving all this stuff behind us. So happy so far. Happy to be in Budapest at the CAPA event. Wonderful weather, wonderful event. Also, this now shows, I think, the industry is finally coming back. After nearly 3 years of fighting, everybody is enjoying that now we are coming back to normal and everybody is careful of not overdoing it. And I think every airline now looks exactly at all the warning signals. But we, yeah, we see them, but I think we can handle it this year much better. And if nothing major happens, we should enjoy now all going back into territories where we used to be before 2019. Yeah, it's true. I'm getting told that I'm a salesman for the A220. That speaks for me because we in airBaltic with the largest fleet now of A220-300s, we're very happy with the aircraft. Our success is built on that aircraft. We are a single fleet operator. We have the lowest cost ex-fuel now since we operate. So that's thanks to the aircraft. We're very happy with it. There's engine issues with all new GTF engines, which we also deal with, but we are very happy, waiting for another 10 aircraft to come in the next 12 months. And then, yeah, our 50 aircraft are complete. It's because of grounded aircraft, which without having engines, we need to bring in other airlines temporarily because we at the same time also fly for others with our aircraft. And unfortunately, The forecast of how many engines we would get to replace engines was not going down to zero. So we are taking a couple of aircraft in to fulfill our summer program, which is pretty ambitious. And we have the bookings already, so we need to take in short-term lift. It's progressing very well. We are waiting for the so-called STC where SpaceX is trying to get an STC for the A220 for the antenna. This should be within the next 6 months, and then we start rolling it out. And in a very short time, we will have the internet, the high-speed internet on all aircraft. It will be a disruption because the technology is so different to what exists today. We will see a lot of knock-on effect of what is happening with internet on an aircraft once that is arriving. I'm very excited about that one because This will change a little bit how you perceive traveling on an aircraft in Europe. I think looking at the daily news on technology, there's every day something which is brand new. If we now look at the field of AI, like a year ago, hardly anybody was talking about it. Now you open any news and it's about AI. I think that will be the field where we will also have a lot of impact to all of us. And of course, we try to grab whatever is there and makes sense for us. But the key focus for airBaltic is now Getting out of the crisis, showing that our model works, preparing for the IPO next year, and then take the airline back into private hands. Innovation, we will always try to be on top as we were in the past, but there's no— nothing else than the Starlink at the moment coming. If there's something new, probably will be out very soon. Thank you.

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