“The Qantas Group faces some significant challenges, but we’re fundamentally optimistic about the future. Almost two-thirds of our pre-COVID earnings came from the domestic market, which is positioned to recover quickly. We have the leading full service and low fares airlines in Australia, where distance makes air travel essential, and diversified earnings through Qantas Loyalty and Qantas Freight.
As a business, we’re focused on returning to profit and building long term shareholder value. As the national carrier, we remain committed to supporting tourism, connecting regional communities and safely flying millions of people every year.”
– Alan Joyce, Qantas Group CEO.
Qantas was founded more than 100 years ago in the middle of turbulent times. In 1920, the world was recovering from the Great War and a devastating pandemic. Throughout our long history, we’ve faced many periods of upheaval, uncertainty and dealt with many sudden shocks.
We draw strength from this history and know we’ve always come back from a crisis stronger than before.
In June 2020Opens external site we outlined a three-year plan to guide the Qantas Group through the COVID-19 crisis and towards a brighter future.
The overall aim was to rightsize and restructure the business to remove $1 billion of costs from the business annually from FY23 onwards.
After the first year, our plan is ahead of forecasts, with savings of more than $650 million in the first 12 months.
Since the start of the pandemic we’ve played a vital role keeping regional Australia connected. We’ve also operated hundreds of charter and repatriation flights to bring Australians home, and thousands of freight flights to carry foreign aid and local exports.
As national vaccine targets are met and restrictions ease we’ll repair our balance sheet and pursue new opportunities – including Project Sunrise, our ambition for more non-stop international flights.
The vaccine roll out and national re-opening plan has also given us more certainty around the restart of our International business.
All Australian states are on track to reach the 80 per cent target by December 2021 – which is the trigger set by National Cabinet for starting to carefully open to some parts of the world.
The nature of COVID means our assumptions may have to change, as they have several times already. But through the difficult decisions we’ve made since the onset of the pandemic we’re now in a much better position now to deal with uncertainty.
We’re confident that as restrictions ease and we return more of our people and aircraft to the skies, the Qantas Group is positioned for long-term success.