LATAM Airlines Brazil CEO Jerome Cadier at CAPA's Latin America Aviation & LCCs Summit

Transcript

Jerome Cadier:I think we do see more potential of looking at new bases in the domestic market, and this is given the competitiveness of LATAM, but also the fact that the domestic market is being faster— not only faster to recover, but faster to grow above 2019. International will still take at least another 2 years to come back to the same level, but there is, yes, potential to look at new bases given the Brazil moment and the LATAM competitiveness. I think that the Brazilian market over the last 3 or 4 years, even before the pandemic, became a more rational market, and that is clear since basically Avianca left the market. And what we see is capacity growing, but growing at the right level, and operations being more sustainable in the long run. Hard to say if that will continue or not, but the fact is the Brazilian market will continue to grow, and eventually there will be more competitors entering the market, so we do need to see what will happen over the next couple of years in terms of competitive dynamic that will probably change. It's difficult when we talk about the cost of fuel because it's still varying a lot. So if we were talking 2 weeks ago, I'd probably be more inclined to say yes, but last week and this week has been a tough one. So at the end of the day, we still have to see how stable this current price will be. Do I believe that still prices need to go up a bit? Probably yes, to be more sustainable in the long run, but I do expect over the long run as well We'll see fuel prices going down. So this will be the balance of how much more we can see the prices going down before balance is reached. We are a bit above pre-pandemic when we look at domestic fleet. We're flying a bit more, but we are also with more than 100% of ASKs compared to before. But then on the international, we do have the fleet below what we had in pre-pandemic level as we retired the A350s. And so we took this opportunity to make it more homogeneous.

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