Lufthansa Reports Record Cargo Profit

Lufthansa, Europe’s second largest airline, reported a record profit of $187 million on its cargo operations, driven by surging freight volumes on its Americas and Asia/Pacific networks and intensive cost cutting.

The German carrier, which lost $172 million on cargo in the year earlier period, boosted freight revenue in the six months leading to June 30 by just over 40 percent to $1.67 billion from $1.2 billion.

Second quarter profit was $142 million against an $80.6 million loss in the same period in 2009 on a 61 percent jump in revenues to $936 million.

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Air France-KLM, Lufthansa’s main European cargo rival, reported an operating profit of $14.3 million on revenues of just over $1 billion earlier in the week.

Lufthansa Cargo, the carrier’s all-cargo unit, generated the bulk of the profits and revenues, hailed by the parent company as “a truly remarkable performance”.

“The freight business shows that consistent cost management also pays off during market recovery phases,” Lufthansa said.

Lufthansa Cargo abandoned its reduced working hours program completely in the second quarter and began to bring decommissioned freighters back into service.

Lufthansa Cargo will post a “substantially positive operating result” and an increase on 2009 revenues for the full year, the carrier said.

“The fear that the dynamic growth in the freight business was a short-lived phenomenon, only stemming from industrial companies restocking their inventories after the [world economic] crisis, have not proven true.”

“On the contrary – we have even observed a recovery in European exports,” Lufthansa said.

The cargo figures helped Lufthansa triple its second quarter income to $207 million compared with $67.6 million a year earlier on a 33 percent increase in revenues to $9 billion.

The Lufthansa group’s first half freight traffic, including SwissWorldCargo, climbed 19.1 percent from a year ago to 939,000 metric tons – of which Lufthansa Cargo accounted for 830,000 tonnes, an increase of 19.6 percent from the first six months of 2009.

Lufthansa’s cargo load factor increased 12.6 percentage points to 68.9 percent.