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Old 04-23-2014 | 06:14 PM
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Razor
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From: 7ERA
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From today's Earnings Call. Overall very positive but with some interesting points from the pilot perspective.

As TSquare would say, good thing bigger pays better And don't count on any new aircraft from the widebody RFP until they are on the ramp with a Widget on the tail Good news on Trainer though.

David E. Fintzen – Barclays Capital, Inc.

Hey, good morning everyone. Just a question, kind of I guess on the wide RFP, but more conceptual. You’ve obviously gotten a lot of CASM benefit with the regional up-gauging and the domestic up-gauging. Are there similar long-term opportunities in international to move towards bigger airplanes or is that a market that’s more fragmented and you actually end up moving down in aircraft size? Just kind of curious how that plays through CASM over the next many years?

Edward H. Bastian

Talking about the causes – this is Ed, David; I don’t know that there’s a huge up-gauge strategy on the international. Certainly there’s a big CASM benefit as we look at the fuel efficiency of the new aircraft. We do operate a large fleet of 747s. So we would expect those would be candidates for replacement in this next cycle. If anything, we’d be down-gauging a bit there, but certainly picking up a very nice CASM return, probably thinking somewhere in the orders of 20% to 25% more fuel efficiency on the new aircraft.


John D. Godyn – Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC

Okay. Fair enough. I was hoping the team could also elaborate a bit on the aircraft RFP. There were some comments, I think, in the press about a hopeful outlook on the A330 NEO. On the other hand of course the team is very ROIC focused, and I guess there is a third component to that how it relates to the long-term CapEx guidance that you’ve all spoken to.

Richard H. Anderson

Well, we are just testing the market and it will be a pretty long process to see whether there is anything that makes sense from an ROIC standpoint, and the number could be, it could be a lot less than the number that we’ve talked about there. It just depends on what happens when we get the RFP responses back. And what we’ve said in our long-term guidance, it remains unchanged. We’re finished with all the flat-bed mods and you saw this year we’re down at – we’re at a number of about $2.3 billion in CapEx. So, we’re going to continue to make certain that whatever investments we do make are consistent with what you’ve seen us do in terms of return on invested capital and returning capital to shareholders.



Savanthi Syth – Raymond James & Associates, Inc.

But just a follow-up question on the refinery, has the upgrade work been completed, and is expectation still that it will be somewhat profitable in the second quarter and maybe profitable in the year?

Paul A. Jacobson

Good morning, Savi. This is Paul. The upgraded work has been completed. We have been producing approximately 50% distillate products throughout the month of March. We do expect that we will be profitable in the June quarter.