Q3 Earnings Off to a Roar With Delta

Third-quarter earnings season took flight this morning with a stellar report from Delta Air Lines ($DAL), which lately has been the first big filer to publish earnings after quarter-close. Delta officially filed its Q3 report at 6:31 a.m., and of course Calcbench had indexed all the disclosures pretty much immediately. 

We can start with the top line numbers on the income statement, which all looked good. Revenue was $16.67 billion, up 6.35 percent from the year-ago period. Operating expenses were up only 4.96 percent, pretax income was up 13.8 percent, and net income popped 11.4 percent. See Figure 1, taken from our Company-in-Detail page. 



Cool stuff, but we love airline earnings releases for all the non-GAAP metrics they also report — and which Calcbench captures and indexes too.


Most notably, airlines report total revenue per available seat mile (TRASM) and cost per available seat mile (CASM) to keep investors informed about how efficiently the business is getting paying customers into seats. Figure 2, below, charts Delta’s performance on both metrics since the start of 2021.



In fact, let’s have some fun and calculate “profit per available seat mile,” which presumably would be known as PASM. This isn’t a metric Delta or other airlines actually report, but you can calculate it easily enough by subtracting CASM from TRASM. Hence we arrive at Figure 3, below.



PASM might seem volatile from quarter to quarter, but that trendline in red has a nice upward slope. 


For Calcbench subscribers who are diehard airline analysts, we also have our Airlines Earnings Template. The template is a spreadsheet available on DropBox that tracks numerous disclosures in the airline sector, including:


  • TRASM, or revenue per available seat mile

  • CASM, costs per available seat mile

  • Load factor, which is the percentage of seating capacity filled by customers

  • Fuel consumed

  • Average fuel cost per gallon

  • Percentage of revenue coming from passengers

  • EPS


The template populates automatically with the latest data as airlines file their numbers; we should have Q3 data from all the big players before Halloween. The template only works if you are (a) a Calcbench professional-level subscriber; and (b) have installed our Excel Add-in — but once you do that, you’ll have all the latest data at your fingertips. (If you need help with any of that, contact us at us@calcbench.com.) 


Congrats to Delta. Many more Q3 releases will arrive soon!

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