Pedro Heilbron
Analyst · Goldman Sachs
Thank you, Joe. Good morning to all and thank you for participating in our second quarter earnings call. Last night, we reported our second quarter results and as always, I want to congratulate our team for another quarter of solid operational and financial results. Looking at our main second quarter highlight, consolidated capacity for the quarter grew almost 25%. Our operating revenues and passenger traffic increased more than 20%, led by our international traffic, which expanded a very strong 25% during what is seasonally our weakest quarter. We saw slight year-over-year decrease in unit revenues as a result of lower load factors, which was partly offset by an increase in yields. This, along with an increase in our effective cost of jet fuel, led to an operating margin of 14%, which maintains our position among the most profitable airlines in the industry. During the quarter, we took delivery of 5 737-800 aircraft and returned 2 of our 737-700 leases to end the quarter with 80 aircraft. In June, we continued our network expansion by adding 4 new destinations: Las Vegas, which is now our seventh city in the U.S., Recife, also our seventh city in Brazil; Liberia, serving the province of Guanacaste, our second destination in Costa Rica; and Curacao, our 15th Caribbean destination. More recently on July 14, we launched service to Iquitos, our second destination in Peru. With these new cities, our network now covers 64 destinations in 29 countries. By far, the most complete network for intra-Latin America travel. In addition to launching these new destinations, we continued increasing daily frequencies in important markets. For instance in June, we increased Lima, Medellin and Miami from 4x to 5x daily service. Cancun increased to 4x daily and Guayaquil, Quito, San Juan and Cartagena went from 2 to 3 daily flights. We also increased the daily service, several recently launched markets such as Asuncion, Brasília, Porto Alegre and Santa Cruz. Another important highlight for the quarter was our formal entry into the Star Alliance. Our team is proud and excited to be part of the largest and most prestigious global airline network. This strategic step will enhance our network's global reach while assuring world-class passenger service through access to the alliance's benefits. At the same time, corporate earnings integration into Star will bolster the alliance's presence in Latin America, one of the fastest growing aviation markets. I want to take this opportunity to again thank all of those who have contributed to this successful integration. Looking forward, we expect good results in our seasonally stronger second half of the year as we continue to see a healthy revenue environment with good trends in book load factors and average shares across most of the network. As a result, for Q3 and Q4, we expect RASM improvement over this quarter, which along with a lower fuel cost forecast, should allow us to deliver our operating margin guidance for the year. Despite some global economic uncertainty, Latin American economies with few exceptions are healthy and growing. On top of that, Panama's economy is doing very well. For the first quarter, we grew about 9% and it's expected to grow at similar levels for the full-year, supported by large capital investment projects including the expansion of the Panama Canal and the construction of a metro system. These and other infrastructure outreach, as well as considerable private investment, are part of the wider plans to further develop Panama into the leading business and logistics hub in the region. Furthermore, the government has already started planning the next expansion of the Tocumen airport, which will involve an investment of between $350 million and $400 million and the addition of 20 mortgaged in its first phase. This expansion, which will be financed mainly through the concession of new Duty Free retail space, will ensure that our hub has the necessary infrastructure to accommodate our future needs. As you know, during the last couple of years, we have taken the opportunity to accelerate our growth and consolidate the regional leadership of our network, which included more than 20% growth per year for the last 2 years and our transition from 4 to 6 connecting banks in June last year. As a result, we have built an unquestionable leadership in the intra-Latin America market, offering more convenience through more destinations and greater frequencies than other competing hubs while implementing many initiatives to strengthen our passenger experience. I will also add that this above-average growth has not come at the expense of our unit revenues. Having set the base for our future growth, for 2013 and 2014, we expect to grow closer to historical levels, always maintaining flexibility to adjust capacity up or down if necessary. Additionally, our growth should be more focused towards increasing frequencies rather than adding destinations as we give some opportunity for the 14 new destinations in the last 12 months or so to mature. So to summarize, the fundamentals of our business model are very strong. We continue to operate in growing and mostly underserved markets with an emerging middle class that can only be served efficiently through a hub. Our Panama Airport is better positioned to serve this market and with 34 gates and 2 runways, Tocumen also has infrastructure to accommodate our future growth. With far more intra-Latin America destinations and frequencies, our network continues to be the best option for travel in the region. We continue to implement the necessary initiatives to improve our passengers' experience while maintaining very competitive costs and most importantly, we have a very committed and dedicated team who, day in and day out, win the preference of our passengers through world-class operational performance and customer service. With that said, we feel confident of the opportunities ahead and our ability to continue delivering industry-leading results. Thank you. Now, I'll turn it over to Victor will go over our second quarter results.