Originally Posted by
Sink r8
My guess is that we will say that we're leading the industry in capacity retsraint, have already announced accelerated retirements of less fuel-efficient fleets, will consider further cuts as needed, are reducing CAPEX to a more prudent level, but will continue to invest in the product. Growth guidance of flat may not do the trick, so we'll forecast down 1-3% (pulling all this out of thin air). Since we go up first on most conferences, and on quarterly results, since we're 84% owned by institutional investors, and since we got spanked two quarters ago by not sounding negative enough on capacity, my guess is it will quite the sobering talk. "Growth" will be a taboo word, and every sentence will feature the term "capacity restraint" at least once.
Yep - My guess is that they will point to the cuts we've made over the last year, the DC-9s and RJs cuts, RJ cuts and more RJ cuts. (forgetting to mention in the additional 70/76 seaters and MD-90 coming, because those haven't happened yet). Oh, and "flexibility to reduce" will be mentioned once to show that we can react to too much flying out there.
It's all about making them *think* we're reducing capacity.