Japan’s ANA Counts Cost of Grounded 787; Not Yet Seeking Damages

By James Topham | January 31, 2013

All Nippon Airways Co, the launch airline for Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner jet that has been grounded with undiagnosed battery problems, said it lost more than $15 million in revenue from having to cancel flights this month.

Asia’s top airline by revenue said it was unclear as to when Boeing’s sophisticated new plane would resume commercial flights, making it harder to predict the longer-term financial impact of having the plane idle.

ANA, valued at close to $7 billion, said it had not yet decided whether to claim compensation from Boeing, and it had no plans, for now, to change a growth strategy that has the technologically advanced 787 at its core. But it conceded that a prolonged grounding of the plane would impact that strategy.

“We have not decided on our right to demand damages, but naturally going ahead, if a damage amount is decided for the incident, we will negotiate,” Chief Financial Officer Kiyoshi Tonomoto said at a briefing on ANA’s quarterly results.

The Dreamliner, which Boeing says uses a fifth less fuel than traditional planes, opens up new international routes that ANA’s existing fleet can’t handle.

All 50 of the 787s Boeing has delivered to airlines to date are out of action as investigators in Japan and the United States try to find the cause of two recent incidents with the 787’s lithium-ion batteries – a battery fire on a Japan Airlines’ 787 at a U.S. airport and an emergency landing by another plane on a domestic ANA flight after battery problems triggered a smoke alarm.

The grounding of the global Dreamliner fleet – ANA operates 17 of the lightweight, carbon-composite planes – has forced airlines to cancel flights and reschedule passengers on to alternative planes.

ANA has cancelled close to 850 flights until Feb. 18, affecting over 82,000 passengers. The Dreamliner makes up around 7 percent of ANA’s fleet, and the airline normally operates around 1,000 flights a day and carries 3.7 million passengers each month.

Despite the plane’s battery problems, which follow years of development and production delays, investors have kept faith with ANA. Shares in the airline are down just 3.2 percent since before the emergency landing of one of its planes on Jan. 16 – shrinking its market value by around $200 million, the list price of a single Dreamliner.

Few analysts have revised down the carrier’s full-year earnings outlook, and the cost of insuring ANA’s debt against default for 5 years has halved since November.

“When you’re the launch customer there’s going to be problems, and when you add the previous Dreamliner delays into the mix, the reaction from ANA investors is just ‘Here we go again’,” said Shashank Nigam, CEO of industry consultancy SimpliFlying ahead of the earnings report on Thursday.

Q3 PROFIT FALLS
ANA’s October-December operating profit fell by more than a fifth from last year, to 32.2 billion yen ($353.6 million) on revenue that nudged nearly 4 percent higher to 379 billion yen.

Neither ANA nor JAL, which has seven 787s, have said they have considered changing orders for 87 more of the Dreamliners.

For now, ANA has around 150 trained 787 pilots staying at home. As flights are rescheduled, the carrier’s Boeing 777 pilots are having to take the strain, with the extra workload.

“Obviously (the grounding) is a cost increase, but it’s not a massive change of fleets,” said a foreign hedge fund manager.

Nicholas Cunningham, an analyst at Macquarie Capital Securities in Tokyo, said ANA needs to replace its Boeing 767s, a medium-size aircraft with 200-300 seats. “The 787 is ideal for that. It has better fuel economy and as a medium-body aircraft offers flexibility for domestic and international routes,” he said.

Boeing CEO Jim McNerney said on Wednesday the airplane maker stood by the troubled lithium-ion battery technology that has halted deliveries of new Dreamliners, which are still being made.

“We feel good about the battery technology and its fit for the airplane. We have just got to get to the root cause of these incidents and we will take a look at the data as it evolves, but there is nothing that we have learned that causes us to question it at this stage,” he said as Boeing reported market-beating fourth-quarter profits.

Topics Aviation Japan

Was this article valuable?

Here are more articles you may enjoy.