Tokyo (Reuters) -the Japanese airline ANA Holdings reported an operating loss for the first quarter of $9.8 million, or 1.3 billion yen. This is less than a year ago, thanks to a rise in travel demand.
Refinitiv Eikon data showed that this was better than the 14.8 billion yen operating loss that four analysts had predicted. It was also less than the 64.6 billion yen operating loss from the year before.
Revenue increased by 76.2 percent to 350.4 billion yen, and the company maintained its forecast of an operating profit of 50 billion yen for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2023.
The president of ANA Holdings, Koji Shibata, said last month that the company was on track to meet its full-year profit goal. The number of domestic passengers for ANA and its low-cost carrier, Peach Aviation, is now about 90% of what it was before the pandemic.
Domestic flight demand, on the other hand, could go down as COVID-19 cases rise because of the BA.5 variant. Last week, there were a record 233,094 cases of COVID-19 across the country.
Japan started slowly letting tourists back in in June, after being mostly closed to non-residents for more than two years because of measures taken because of the pandemic.
Still, the government is only letting in 20,000 people per day, which is a small fraction of what it was before the pandemic, and tourists can only visit on guided package tours.
($1 = 132.5700 yen)
