Amadeus continues strong growth trend in the first quarter

Our financial performance in the first quarter of 2018 was negatively impacted by the US dollar depreciation relative to the Euro. Excluding this foreign exchange impact, as well as that of our newly applied accounting standard (IFRS 16), revenue and EBITDA grew 8.2% and 7.9% respectively.

“Air volumes in our Distribution segment grew at a steady pace. We also continued to secure and expand content for our subscribers by renewing or signing content agreements with nine airlines”, explained Luis Maroto, President & CEO of Amadeus.

Among those agreements was the one with Air France KLMthat enables distribution through a private channel. Thanks to this agreement, those Amadeus travel seller customers that have a deal with the airline group will be able to access content through Amadeus without a surcharge, which started to be levied from April 2018.

“In IT Solutions, we saw progress throughout our customer base, with new contracts such as the one with Philippine Airlinesfor Altéa or the one with ASA Cape Verde Airports, which contracted ACUS Mobile during the quarter”, he continued.

We registered significant growth in passengers boarded of 22.7%, driven mainly by the implementations completed in 2017 (Southwest Airlines, Japan Airlines, Boliviana de Aviación, GoAir, Viva Air Peru among others). These migrations also contributed to the expansion of our international footprint: 65.3% of our passengers boarded were generated outside Europe (at the close of 2017, 57.7% of our passengers boarded originated outside Europe).

We also progressed well on our upselling efforts, with existing customers like Finnairand Qantascontracting further Amadeus solutions. Finnair signed up for Amadeus Anytime Merchandising and was also the pilot customer of our recently launched Amadeus Agent Pay solution, which facilitates payments of bookings through airlines’ call centers. Qantas chose us as partner for its digital redesign.

The positive underlying business growth trend leads us to “look at the rest of the year with confidence”, said Luis Maroto.

To learn more about today’s results please take a look at our Q1 2018 financial results infographic,read the press release, or visit the Investor Relations website, where you will find all the documents filed with the stock exchange authorities this morning.