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FLYBE.COM (FLYB)     

jimmy b - 30 Jan 2015 14:07

Going up or down ?
As the original thread was cancelled today (and with the large swings in the share price) i thought we needed another one

Chart.aspx?Provider=EODIntra&Code=FLYB&S

Stan - 01 Feb 2015 21:39 - 37 of 117

Oh I see, yes I forgot I suppose yet another payment demanded for the online version.

cynic - 01 Feb 2015 22:06 - 38 of 117

you're right; ST is subscribe only on-line and as i get the real thing .....

at least no one has accused me of making up a story :-)
however, if you're a holder, i would strongly recommend that you acquire a viewing of the article - from your local library perhaps? - and then you can make up your own mind

JackBell - 01 Feb 2015 22:21 - 39 of 117

edited by MoneyAM

Chris Carson - 01 Feb 2015 23:20 - 40 of 117

Correct Jack, call me cynical but it doesn't take a brain surgeon to work out that if you yourself are short on a stock you will find the means to de-ramp it. Especially if you are receiving e-mails from a certain banned poster who is de-ramping the shit out of it across the road. :0)

skinny - 02 Feb 2015 07:30 - 41 of 117

Shock._Horror._.gif

jimmy b - 02 Feb 2015 08:16 - 42 of 117

Chris , i read the article too by buying the paper and it doesn't make good reading for Flybe .

cynic - 02 Feb 2015 08:19 - 43 of 117

jack - if i could have, i would have, but at lest i told you where to look

chris - you should know better! ..... you might wind-up sticky, but you'll have little or no joy with me

=========

in fact, cyril looked as though he might have access to ST on line on the AFR thread, so i sked him if he could c+p

Chris Carson - 02 Feb 2015 08:22 - 44 of 117

:0)

ExecLine - 02 Feb 2015 09:27 - 45 of 117

Jet that is dragging Flybe into the red

A fleet of unused aircraft is weighing down the regional airline as it struggles to stay aloft

John Collingridge Published: 1 February 2015

A fleet of nine unused Embraer 195 jets is costing the airline £26m a year

Hidden from view at Exeter and Newquay airports, a £26m headache codenamed Project Blackbird is gathering dust in the hangars. Since last April a fleet of nine Embraer 195 jets bearing the white and pale blue livery recently discarded by British regional airline Flybe has been housed there.

Last March the carrier, led by former easyJet chief commercial officer Saad Hammad, took the drastic decision to ground the 195s. The 118-seaters, bought only seven years earlier, were now surplus to requirements.

Since then the idle Embraers have been burning a hole in Flybe’s fragile finances. Keeping the planes airworthy and paying their leases while forgoing passenger revenues costs Flybe £26m a year.

Hammad and his team are desperately trying to wriggle out of the long-term leases and pass the aircraft on to other operators, but this is taking longer than they — or the City — expected.

Project Blackbird is just one.............................

More of the article at: http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/business/Companies/article1513451.ece

(but it will cost you £1 to read the rest of it.)

cynic - 02 Feb 2015 10:01 - 46 of 117

many thanks EL ......

no doubt some of our advfn brethren who lurk here will have already seen and perhaps posted the whole there .... in which case, one of them may care to c+p from there to here as there are clearly a number of pikeys who are too tight to buy a copy of ST for themselves

hidden within that article was a little sentence ......
"Hammad, who turned down down requests for an interview...... "

skinny - 02 Feb 2015 10:04 - 47 of 117

I've posted this umpteen times before, but its free to subscribe if you only want to access a few articles per week/month.

cynic - 02 Feb 2015 10:09 - 48 of 117

bit like FT then, but thanks

Stan - 02 Feb 2015 10:36 - 49 of 117

Is this the whole article Alf?

C&P from over the road:

"That full article from yesterdays ST is definitely a dampener, it seems BA made the right decision last year:-

Hidden from view at Exeter and Newquay airports, a £26m headache codenamed Project Blackbird is gathering dust in the hangars. Since last April a fleet of nine Embraer 195 jets bearing the white and pale blue livery recently discarded by British regional airline Flybe has been housed there.

Last March the carrier, led by former easyJet chief commercial officer Saad Hammad, took the drastic decision to ground the 195s. The 118-seaters, bought only seven years earlier, were now surplus to requirements.

Since then the idle Embraers have been burning a hole in Flybe’s fragile finances. Keeping the planes airworthy and paying their leases while forgoing passenger revenues costs Flybe £26m a year.

Hammad and his team are desperately trying to wriggle out of the long-term leases and pass the aircraft on to other operators, but this is taking longer than they — or the City — expected.

Project Blackbird is just one of many challenges facing Flybe as it tries to build itself into a profitable regional operation in an era of cut-throat budget rivals and struggling provincial economies.

Last week Flybe stunned the markets by warning it will only break even this year, in contrast to the £9m profit pencilled in by analysts at its broker. Once the cost of the parked Embraers is factored in, the losses will be substantial.

Meanwhile, competitors at London City airport have responded to Flybe’s arrival there by slashing prices, adding seats and tempting passengers with loyalty offers.

The carrier’s planes may be fuller, with its load factor increasing to 74.3% in the last quarter of 2014 from 68.7% a year earlier, but this has come at the expense of profitability. At the same time the airline has shrunk, with available seats falling 6.1% to 2.5m over the quarter and passenger revenues down 3.8% to £126.8m.

Worse still, Flybe’s fuel hedging policy means it will not feel the benefit of the slump in oil prices this year and only marginally next year, even as rival easyJet talks about pumping the savings into lower prices. Flybe’s shares plunged more than 20% after the profit warning, and closed on Friday at 64.75p, valuing the business at £140m.

For investors who backed Hammad’s £150m cash call 11 months ago, the update was deeply unnerving. It raised concerns over whether last year’s £8.1m profit — the first in four years — was a one-off.

Flybe, founded as Jersey European Airways in 1979, has endured a turbulent journey in recent years. It was bought in 1983 by the steel magnate Jack Walker — best known for bankrolling Blackburn Rovers’ run to the Premier League title in 1995 — and renamed Flybe in 2002. Shortly after Walker’s death in 2010, it floated at 295p a share — at a time when the economy was struggling.

Hammad arrived in August 2013 with a CV that boasted of turning around easyJet between 2005 and 2009. Cost cuts initiated by Flybe’s previous boss Jim French were already under way. Hammad continued them with vigour, resulting in 1,100 jobs lost, six bases closed and 30 unprofitable routes axed.

Then came the begging bowl. With the airline having burnt through almost £160m of investment in seven years, Hammad needed all his charm to convince investors to pump funds into “building resilience and profitable growth” at Flybe.

Priced at 110p a share, the cash call won the backing of investors including Aberforth, Quantum, Artemis and Standard Life. Notably, British Airways, then a 15% shareholder, did not take part and last summer sold its 5% stake.

Saad Hammad: haphazard approach Saad Hammad: haphazard approach Hammad was quick to criticise the former team’s strategy. “We had no cost discipline, no commercial leadership, no rigour,” he said in an interview just after the cash call. “There was a bit of voodoo management going on, with no sensible analysis of new routes.”

His strategy is straightforward: build an airline that competes squarely with road and rail travel, slashing fares to tempt passengers aboard. It picked routes that the bigger budget airlines such as easyJet and Ryanair and older carriers like BA and Air France do not bother to serve.

He also raised £20m by selling 25 pairs of take-off and landing slots at Gatwick to easyJet, pledging to invest the proceeds in other routes. Last October, true to his word, Flybe returned to the capital by launching flights to Edinburgh, Belfast, Dublin, Inverness and Exeter from London City airport. “It heralds the rebirth of Flybe,” said Hammad at the time. The routes would funnel 500,000 passengers a year through the airport, he claimed.

Then there is Hammad’s “Purple Way”, a zany drive to change the culture. Flybe’s planes, uniforms and website have changed to a violent plum shade. There is purple mood lighting on board and passengers receive a purple pack of chocolates. Staff must adhere to the five Ps — performance, positivity, passion, people-focus and playfulness.

“Purple power will fuel our journey,” Hammad told the City last summer. “By unleashing the power of purple, we will make our customers happy, our employees happy and our investors happy.”

Investors are anything but. Rivals at City airport have responded aggressively. BA has launched a new service to Dublin and increased frequencies to Edinburgh, while CityJet has refinanced its ageing fleet and is benefiting from the lower oil price. In the face of such opposition, Flybe was recently forced to axe its City to Inverness route and cut its frequency to Exeter.

The HSBC aviation analyst Andrew Lobbenberg also questioned the airline’s timing in raising its exposure to the North Sea oil and gas industry just as it is suffering. “With the drop in the fuel price, we foresee sharply weakening trading for North Sea oil-related domestic flying. Flybe recently reopened an Aberdeen base and is a significant operator from Norwich.”

Other cracks are appearing. Flybe’s new or extended routes from Birmingham to cities such as Oslo and Bordeaux, announced in May, have been quietly scaled back. One industry source puts it bluntly: the airline has an “unbelievably haphazard approach to route planning”.

Aviation consultant Chris Tarry said the company could not afford any more disappointments. “You set out your stall and then have a rendezvous with reality,” he said. “They are competing on an increasing number of routes head on. It’s going to be difficult to make money. We can talk about the UK economy moving ahead but the regional market has always been exceptionally difficult.

“The City is very unforgiving. There’s no scope whatsoever for disappointment. Where do they go if they need cash?”

The regional airline industry is notoriously tough. Last year Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin axed its Little Red regional jets business. The venture, launched in March 2013 from the remnants of BMI, struggled to fill seats on the routes between Heathrow and Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Manchester. Ryanair and easyJet have used their scale and low cost base to undercut rivals sharply.

These changing dynamics in the industry have also created a growing gulf between larger regional airports and smaller, struggling ones. Last month the government was forced to prop up smaller regional airports with a £56m pot to help fund loss-making routes.

Hammad, who turned down requests for an interview, insists Flybe is making progress and points out that it is only one year into a three-year turnaround plan.

His choice of plane — favouring Bombardier’s smaller Dash 8 propeller aircraft over the larger Embraer jets — is designed to give it an edge over bigger budget rivals, as it can fly the 78-seat planes profitably on routes too small for the Airbus A320s and Boeing 737s favoured by them.

Last year he scrapped an order for 20 Embraer 175 jets, swapping the 88-seat planes for 24 more Dash 8s. Aircraft will increasingly be owned rather than leased. Five of the 195s will even be dusted off this summer and flown in service.

It is about having the “right aircraft on the right routes with the right cost structure”, said Hammad last year. A deal to service the Royal Air Force’s new fleet of A400M heavy lift planes will help to bolster revenues in the years ahead.

Will Hammad be granted the time and flexibility needed to implement his strategy? “Turning around an airline is frighteningly difficult,” said Tarry. “You have to demonstrate that behind all the pain it’s worthwhile.”"

cynic - 02 Feb 2015 10:40 - 50 of 117

for sure it will be Stan

it amuses me considerably that if you write that a company is overvalued, is worth shorting or somesuch, you are accused of deramping by a few buffoons
however, while they may write that the self-same company is the dog's bollocks, that is not ramping!

nowt so strange as folks!

Stan - 02 Feb 2015 11:03 - 51 of 117

This is true.

cynic - 02 Feb 2015 11:31 - 52 of 117

thanks for posting that jack, presumably from advfn and from someone called paul scott, whoever he may be but who clearly has a very sore bum

fortunately or otherwise, stan has already posted the actual article

unlike some twits, i refuse to get drawn into silly argument, and am very happy for you and everyone else to place bets as seen fit ...... my choice is already clear

=========

jack - a silly question i'm sure, but are you sure you are not DB in another guise?
for myself, i don't really care, though others might

sinutab - 02 Feb 2015 12:19 - 53 of 117

edited by MoneyAM

JackBell - 02 Feb 2015 12:19 - 54 of 117

edited by MoneyAM

sinutab - 02 Feb 2015 12:28 - 55 of 117

edited by MoneyAM

Bullshare - 02 Feb 2015 13:14 - 56 of 117

Just a reminder that when you register once banned from the BBs, its an idea to try and disguise yourselves posting on the same thread, using the same language doesn't take someone with a degree to work out.

We have some nice little systems that do this in other ways, we keep log files of all actions by those multiple names.

If those who are doing this want to persist we reserve the right to publish those multiple aliases.
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