Corporacíon América Airports outlines revised 2020 business plan

Global airport operator, Corporación América Airports (CAAP) has announced that it experienced a 14.6% drop in EBITDA in 2019 and outlined a number of business measures designed to guide it through the coronavirus crisis.

Fiscal highlights in 2019 are said to include a year-on-year rise of 9.3% in consolidated revenues to $1.5 billion, while passenger traffic across its airports in Argentina, Armenia, Brazil, Ecuador, Italy and Uruguay increased by 2.8% to 84.2 million.

Cargo volumes also increased by 2.9% to 422,000 tons, although aircraft movements declined by 2.6% to 858,000.

CAAP CEO, Martin Eurnekian, said: “We are undergoing an unprecedented health crisis that has rapidly expanded worldwide disrupting the global economy, and in particular the aviation industry, resulting in drastic reductions in passenger traffic.

“In these trying times the first priority and utmost concern of our company are the health and safety of our employees and customers.

“The coronavirus outbreak comes at a time when adverse macro conditions in Argentina were already dampening travel demand and FX depreciation impacted performance in Brazil. This resulted in revenue declines of 6% ex-IFRIC12 for the fourth quarter and nearly 7% for the full year.

“Despite the impact in our top-line, we delivered comparable adjusted EBITDA margin expansion of over 220 basis points in the quarter. We ended the year with a comparable adjusted EBITDA of nearly 450 million dollars and an ex-IFRIC 12 margin of 37%.

“Travel bans and restrictions introduced over the last month to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic across our countries of operations are taking a heavy toll. We began to see the impact of the virus on traffic flow late February in Italy and around the second week of March at our LatAm airports.

“Reacting rapidly in the face of this disruption, we formed a crisis committee composed of myself and the operating CEOs of each of our subsidiaries and we are implementing a strategy focused on four key fronts: protecting our employees and passengers; introducing cost controls and cash preservation measures; undertaking near-term negotiations with regulatory bodies and seeking government support; as well as beginning the initial stages of renegotiating the economic re-equilibrium of our concessions.

“While the path to recovery remains uncertain and is dependent on several factors including the duration of the pandemic, government assistance and the resilience of the global economies, we are working on all fronts to reinforce our business.

“We have built a strong network of international and domestic airports and have made significant investments over the past years to further modernise our airport infrastructure that will play an important role in reigniting economic growth once the current travel restrictions begin to be lifted.”