RYANAIR has toasted its pandemic recovery with a doubling of sales — on the back of higher fares and a travel revival.
The Dublin-based budget airline said total sales in the year to March 31 rose by 124 per cent to £9.4billion.
Ryanair flew 168.6million passengers, three-quarters more than the 97million it carried last year.
As a result, it swung to a pre-tax profit of £1.25 billion, compared to a loss of £308million the previous year.
The flyer, once famed for its 99p flights, has hiked fares by 50 per cent to an average of £31.05 in the past year — with fares still ten per cent higher than pre-Covid.
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Ryanair’s accounts also revealed it’s now making just under £20 per customer for “discretionary services” such as priority boarding and reserved seating.
Boss Michael O’Leary said that despite the higher fares it would still “wipe the floor” with its rivals — claiming they had made “irrationally exuberant” fare hikes.
He insisted: “Other airlines have lifted theirs much higher.”
But he warned prices were likely to rise further due to higher staff costs.
Ryanair’s chief is the latest travel boss to celebrate a bounce-back after Covid.
He credited the surge in bookings to people “spending a long time being locked up and now wanting to get out”.
The firm is also enjoying the return of more business travellers, particularly to European cities such as Dublin, he added.
Mr O’Leary, Ryanair’s frontman for almost three decades, recently renewed his contract until 2028 but he said the airline had stepped up succession planning.
He said: “The business is no longer heavily dependent on me.”
CHINESE BAN FOR U.S. CHIPS
CHINA has escalated its tech war with the US by banning memory chip maker Micron on national security grounds.
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The country’s Cyberspace Administration said Micron products posed “serious network security risks” and would be barred from nationally important firms — a move that could stop the firm selling to the telecom, transport and finance sectors.
China accounted for around 10 per cent of Micron’s sales last year, worth £2.6billion.
The block comes just a day after US president Joe Biden said relations with China would improve “very shortly”.
At the start of the year, the US restricted exports to Huawei.
M&S BABY PLAN
MARKS & SPENCER is offering parents of premature babies up to 12 weeks’ paid leave if they require neonatal care.
The retailer introduced the staff policy after one of its food managers gave birth to a premature baby boy who weighed just 1.7lb — and then spent six months of her maternity leave in hospital.
Sarah Findlater, group HR director, said: “We hope this will allow colleagues to focus on their baby, without having to worry about pay or using up maternity, paternity or adoption leave.”
LLOYDS' ECO JOB
FRUSTRATED tree-huggers can still have a career in the City after Lloyds Banking Group appointed its first ever “group head of nature”.
It has hired Dr Katie Leach to help “ensure nature is embedded in decision making across the group”. The bank already has a head of environmental sustainability but it said Dr Leach would help it tackle climate change.
In February, Lloyds took part in a UN Nature COP15 meeting to help scale and finance projects that “help benefit people and nature”.