TRANSCRIPT SINGAPORE AIRLINES FINANCIAL RESULTS BRIEFING Half-Year Ended 30 September 2007 (Read in conjunction with Powerpoint Presentation) Singapore Expo Wednesday 31 October 2007, 5.05pm E&OE Edited for grammar Speakers: Mr Chan Hon Chew, Senior Vice President Finance In order Mr Chew Choon Seng, Chief Executive Officer Mr Stephen Forshaw, Vice President Public Affairs Mr Huang Cheng Eng, Executive Vice President Marketing and Regions, and Chairman, SIA Cargo Pte Ltd (Recording begins) Mr Chan: Good evening ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us this evening for the presentation of our half year results. I will kick off with the Parent Airline Company. First the highlights. For the half year 2007-08, the Parent Airline’s capacity was down 1.0%. And on this lower capacity we grew passenger carriage by 2.6% and that’s a result of improvement in the passenger load factor by 2.8 points to 80.3%. On the yield side, we saw growth as well by 9.3% and with the higher load factor, higher yield, revenue was up 10.6% to $6.0B. Unit cost gone up but at a slower pace than revenue growth and all this translates to an operating profit of $781M. Let’s take a closer look at the numbers. Total revenue, $6 billion, 10.6 percent higher, this is on the back of 9.4 million passengers carried. Expenditure has gone up as well, about $168 million higher than last year, but in percentage terms, 3.3 percent, at a lower rate than our revenue growth. So as a result, operating profit, $781 million. Let’s take a closer look at the operating statistics. First, the yield was higher by 9.3 percent and that’s really a reflection of the strong travel demand in the airline industry. While in terms of our unit cost, it’s gone up by 5.1 percent and because 1 the yield growth was higher than our unit cost increase, our breakeven load factor has improved by 2.8 points to 70.1 percent. Let’s look at capacity. It was down 1 percent and on that lower capacity we managed to grow passenger carriage by 2.6 percent and that’s from improvement in our load factor, by 2.8 points to 80.3 percent. So with the 2.8 points improvement in our passenger load factor and the 2.8 points improvement in our breakeven load factor, we see the spread between the passenger load factor and the breakeven widening by 5.6 points to 10.2 points. Let’s look at trends for the past four years. A healthy picture, a steady growth in our load factor. Comparing that to our breakeven load factor, however, you will notice for the past three years the breakeven load factor has been going up and that’s a result of higher fuel cost. This year the breakeven load factor has actually gone down for the first half and that’s really a reflection of the strong travel demand in the industry, which benefited our yields. So yield growth was actually higher than increase in our unit cost and at the same time that benefited our load factor, and that has widened our spread between the passenger load factor and breakeven load factor to 10.2 points, comparing against last three years at around 5 points. Moving on to costs, the top five expenditure [items] makes up about 80 percent of our total expenditure. Again, top of the chart here we have fuel, continues to be our biggest expenditure; 36.4 percent; followed by staff cost, about 16.5 percent; aircraft depreciation and rentals, 10 percent; and the other two, less than 10 percent. Let’s take a closer look at fuel expenditure, in US dollars, a year-on-year comparison. The starting point here, the fuel spent for the first half of the previous financial year, we spent US$1.29 billion on fuel. As you saw earlier our capacity went down and as a result there was lower fuel volume uplifted, that reduced our fuel cost by about US$7 million. Year-on-year, in average, weighted average fuel price was lower by about 2 percent and that contributed $27 million reduction in the fuel cost. And for the first half of the year, the total fuel, bill still very high, at US$1.259 billion. Now this is a year-on-year comparison, so it does not reflect the prevailing trend of fuel prices. To put things in perspective, let’s look at the quarter-on-quarter trend of fuel prices. What we saw in the previous chart was year-on-year comparison, meaning the first half of this year compared to the first half of last year. You notice, yes, fuel price was lower but you can see the trend for the first half of this financial year, fuel prices were in an upward trend and as we all know, over the past week we saw fuel prices recording new highs, and for jet fuel prices, breaching the hundred US dollar mark; actually it’s beyond the scale of this graph. So that will be the challenge for the second half of the year. 2 And as we all know we have two mitigating measures; one is of course fuel hedging, our CEO, Mr. Chew, will update on our fuel hedging programme; and of course the other is the fuel surcharge. And this graph shows the fuel surcharge per passenger in US dollars, and from here you can see the trend follows quite closely with the trend of fuel prices and in fact for third and fourth quarter of last financial year, and the first quarter of this financial year, it was in the downward trend. And in fact the first quarter, the current financial year, it went down despite fuel prices going up. That’s because of the time lag. One more slide, before I go: Subsidiaries. First of all, SIA Engineering did better compared to last year; 4.8 percent improvement on account of better contributions from associated companies and joint ventures. SATS, however, bottom line lower by about 4 percent. That’s because of lower revenues and higher expenditure. I will not go into details as these are two listed companies. There will have their separate analysts’ briefings. SIA Cargo, they did well, to turn around from a loss of $36 million last year to a profit of $17 million this year. And that is really on account of effective cost management by SIA Cargo management. Although yields continued to be under pressure, it fell about 4.9 percent, cost control effectively brought unit cost down by 7.6 percent at a higher rate than the reduction in cargo yields. Last but not least, SilkAir, the bottom line, $9.4 million, almost $7 million higher than last year as a result of higher loads and yield growth. With that I conclude this segment of the presentation. I hand over to Mr. Chew. Mr. Chew: Thank you, Hon Chew. Just one additional comment about the cargo turnaround. Hon Chew mentioned good cost management. Yes, but, equally important, it was close capacity management that enabled SIA Cargo to turn around by better than $53 million in six months, year-on-year. Let me now give you the consolidated group numbers. That takes into account the parent company, the main subsidiaries as you saw, plus all the associates. And this is the picture. Group revenue for the six months added up to $7.6 billion, which is an improvement over the first half of ’06 by 8 percent and in line with the four year compound average growth of 7 percent. So there’s been quite a steady trend, uptrend in group revenue. On the expenditure side, as led by the parent company, the rise in expenditure has been mitigated to under 2 percent, year-on-year, and this compares with a four year 3 average growth in expenditure of 6.4 percent, which is not unnatural in the order of things that as you go to a much higher base, then the rate of growth should slow down, as indeed is shown here. Next, group operating profit for the first half. Yes, the number is correct. Operating profit, $982 million, which is an 84 percent improvement from the $533m, for the first half of the last financial year. Contribution to group operating profit by unit; SIA, the parent passenger airline company, contributed nearly 80 percent of the total group operating surplus. SATS pulled in 9.5 percent which is 8 points lower than the preceding year’s first half. Engineering Company contributed 6½ percent, in terms of contribution, a drop from 6.2. And SIA Cargo, because of its turnaround, improved its contribution by 7.2 points, and what got traded off in return for the lower contributions from the two listed subsidiaries is reflected in the fact that the parent company’s contribution went up 10 points. So those are the headline numbers; SIA’s operating profit up $413m; SATS, down $3.7m; Engineering company down $4.5m. I hasten to add, to stress, that this is operating profit before contributions to the subsidiaries from their associates and joint ventures. Cargo, up $47.3m; all year-on-year operating profit comparisons. And another analysis of how the improvement in group operating profit came about: last year, for the first half, it was $533 million. Because of improvement in operating revenue throughout the group through higher throughputs, loads, and improvement in yields at the parent airline, and increased business volumes at the subsidiaries added $560 million, bringing total up to $1093m.