Emirates lost $5.5 billion during its last financial year, with a reduction of total revenue of 66 per cent to as travel and flight restrictions capped demand.
The airline received capital injections totalling $3.1 billion (AED 11.3 billion) from the Government of Dubai, “enabling the airline to preserve most of its workforce, and sustain operations as we chart a path to recovery.”
The figures come from the Annual Report of the Emirates Group. The Group includes both Emirates and dnata, the air services provider which including cargo and ground handling, catering, and travel services. The financial year of the Emirates Group, including Emirates, is from April 1 to March 31. Emirates reports its figures in UAE Dirhams (AED) with the exchange rate of the Dirham to the US Dollar fixed at 3.67.
Dnata also received an estimated total relief of nearly AED 800 million in 2020-21, making the total loss $6.6 billion.
The Group says that it “froze recruitment and promotions. UAE-based employees took a six-month salary cut, while other employees supported the company through a combination of pay cuts, furlough or job support programmes where available.”
The combined effect of these cost reduction initiatives across the Group was an estimated saving of $2.2 billion during the year.
In addition, the Group says that “As it became clear that recovery would take longer than initially projected, we made the difficult decision to resize our workforce by 31 per cent in line with reduced operational requirements. This was the first time in our Group’s history that we had to implement redundancies across all parts of the business.”
On the plus side, Emirates said that it “offered fee waivers so customers can rebook without penalty, extended Tier status and Miles validity for Emirates Skywards members, and expedited the processing of 3 million refund requests which returned $2.3 billion to customers.”
