InterGlobe Aviation, which runs India’s largest carrier IndiGo, posted its best-ever March quarter profits, riding on robust demand for the Mahakumbh festival. With plane seats in short supply, fares in February had soared.
The Gurugram-based company recorded a consolidated net profit of Rs 3,068 crore in Q4Fy25, a 62 % jump year on year (y-o-y). It also beat the consensus estimates from Bloomberg of Rs 2,574 crore.
Pieter Elbers, CEO, IndiGo, said demand had been good in the fourth quarter as had the execution “with Mahakumbh obviously helping”.
IndiGo’s Q4 consolidated revenue from operations jumped 24% (y-o-y) to Rs 22,152 crore, beating the estimate of Rs 21,887 crore. The number of passengers carried during the quarter increased 20% y-o-y to 31.9 million while the available seat kilometres (ASK) increased by 21% to 42.1 billion. The airline’s yield increased by 2.4% to Rs 5.32 and load factor improved by 1.1 points to 87.4%.
IndiGo has guided for the induction of one plane every week which will help the airline keep pace with the growing traffic. “We are expecting the Airbus XLRs to come within this financial year, perhaps even before the end of this calendar year. These will come in two-cabin configuration,” Elbers added.
The company also noted that the response to its business class offering has been ‘good’ on all the sectors it has offered. “We have seen fairly good performance in the Delhi-Mumbai sector. It is important that we create good market awareness on this product. The response has been very good on the Bangkok route as well,” Elbers added.
IndiGo is launching its ‘Stretch’ business class product on 40 of its Airbus A321neo aircraft. Of these 16 aircraft are already in use. Delhi-Bengaluru, Delhi-Chennai and Delhi-Hyderabad routes have seen business class being offered by the airline.
As of March 31, IndiGo had a total cash balance of Rs 48,170 crore, comprising Rs 33,153 crore of free cash and Rs 15,017 crore of restricted cash.
IndiGo was among the airlines impacted by the closure of Pakistan airspace and the closure of a number of India airports in the current quarter. Two international routes – Tashkent and Almaty – have been suspended by the airline out of the total 41 that it operates.
“There are 30-35 flights where the average flying time has increased in the range of 20 mins. We will reinstate Tashkent and Almaty when the Pakistan airspace reopens. Out of the 32 airports closed, 11 were served by IndiGo with total cancellations of 170 flights a day,” Elbers added.
From more than 60 planes being grounded in the December quarter, IndiGo improved the number to 50-59 in the March quarter to between 40-49 in the current quarter.