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Fresh off reporting a massive loss, Air Canada is increasingly confident the federal government will soon come through with a financial aid package for the beleaguered airline industry.
The net loss in the fourth quarter was $1.16 billion, or $3.91 per diluted share, Air Canada said Friday in a statement. A year earlier, in the last quarter before COVID-19 affected operations, the carrier had net income of $152 million, or 56 cents a share. Air Canada burned through $1.38 billion of cash, or about $15 million a day, in the last three months of 2020.
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Daniel Slim/AFP via Getty Images
Delta Air Lines missed estimates for adjusted earnings per share in the fourth quarter and issued a forecast for the first quarter that was below Wall Street estimates.
Ordinarily, that might be enough to knock down the stock. But shares of Delta (ticker: DAL) are rallying more than 3% because things could have been a lot worse.
Delta posted an adjusted loss of $2.53 a share, missing consensus estimates for a loss of $2.50 a share, according to FactSet. The airline reported passenger revenue of $2.7 billion, largely matching forecasts and down 74% from a year earlier. Total adjusted revenue (including cargo, ancillary, and credit-card revenue) came in at $3.5 billion, missing estimates for $3.7 billion in total sales.
Like most passenger carriers, Delta isn’t close to turning a profit. The full-service network airline is expected to report sales of $3.7 billion, down 67% from a year earlier, according to consensus estimates. Wall Street expects Delta to report a $2 billion pretax loss, resulting in a loss of $2.50 per share.
Yet its sequential progress is likely to move the stock. Delta’s $2 billion loss would be an improvement over its $2.5 billion loss in the third quarter a sign that it’s on track to turning profitable later in the year. Wall Street expects the carrier to post another $855 million loss in the first quarter but sees an inflection point in the spring, with pretax income turning positive.