Norwegian reports best ever quarterly results

Norwegian (NAS) reported a pre-tax profit of almost NOK900m. This is the company’s best ever result, an improvement of NOK187m from previous year. New aircraft have saved the airline NOK28m in fuel costs compared to the third quarter in 2011. However, these savings are offset by an additional bill of NOK25m – a result from Avinor’s (Norway’s civil aviation authority) lack of air traffic controllers at airports in Norway. During the third quarter 2012, Norwegian flew almost 5.2 million passengers. This is 580,000 more passengers than the third quarter in 2011, a new record for Norwegian. The third quarter is also characterized by a high load factor of 82%. On average, each passenger flew longer, which in turn increased the RPK (passenger traffic) by 17% in the third quarter. The ASK (seat capacity) increased with 20%.