Nathan Hong
Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Please proceed.
Hi, thanks for taking the question. Steve, I’m just thinking about what we’re seeing across the global economies? And I was hoping if you could take a step back and just offer an outlook on where we are in the cycle?
Steven Udvar-Házy: Well, I just completed two back-to-back around the world trips, where we visited 15 different airlines. So it’s a nice cross-section of airlines in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, Far East, Australia, and the South Pacific. And the consistent message that we got is most of these airlines are experiencing traffic growth in the last six months of between 5% and 12% over the same periods previously. They’re anticipating a modest, I would say, the general feeling is, they’re anticipating a modest increase over the next two, three years in oil prices, so all the airlines are planning for a little bit of upward pressure on oil prices. And particularly in the lesser developed countries, there’s still a high rate of formation of middle-class earners, which will filter down to more air travel. We’re also seeing an impact in North America, Europe, and Asia from traffic stimulation of the low-cost carriers, the LCCs and now the ULCCs, which in North America right now we have people like Spirit and Frontier are taking a lot of traffic out of cars or creating traffic that heretofore did not go at all on these trips. And we’re seeing similar phenomenon in Eastern Europe with, for example, Wizz, they just went public on the London Stock Exchange. And, of course, in Asia, where we have a proliferation of low-cost carriers, all the way from Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia, including Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. So what we’re seeing here is a modest increase in GDP. Air traffic continues to grow at 1.5 to 2 times GDP. Load factors are at historically strong levels for many airlines in Q1 was the highest load factors they’ve ever had in the slowest three months of the year. And we’re seeing this traffic stimulation effect from the LCCs and ULCCs. I hope that gives you kind of a broad overview.