Amadeus' year-to-date performance has been boosted by a strong showing in Asia-Pacific and North America, while it continues to invest hundreds of millions of euros developing its non-air portfolio.
The operational highlights show that, compared with the first nine months of 2014, the number of air bookings made via its GDS business was up by 9.4% to 387.9 million, resulting in its global market share increasing by 1.9%.
Amadeus offers a regional breakdown, which confirms that Asia-Pacific and North America are by far the biggest growth drivers for its air distribution.
Non-air bookings through the GDS were up 4.2%, with "rail bookings" the main driver of this, according to CEO Luis Maroto's prepared remarks on the earnings call.
The key metric for its airline IT business is passengers boarded, and this is up 8.2% to 562.3 million.
Again, APAC is the growth story, here, up by 25% to reach 149 million.
The earnings call allowed analysts to clarify the financial minutae, although a few questions were about the impact on the numbers of Lufthansa's distribution cost charge.
CFO Ana de Pro flat-batted the questions with the line that "we don't talk about the financial impact of individual customers."
de Pro however did reveal a breakdown of Amadeus' €469.7 million spend so far this year on research and development, confirming Amadeus' commitment to ramping up its non-air business. "Product portfolio expansion and evolution", which includes non-air and new business units, accounted for half the total.
"Customer implementations" account for 30% while "internal technological projects" account for 20%.
And the €469.7m on RnD is nearly 20% higher than the spend in the first nine months of 2014.
A question about Amadeus' M&A strategy, particularly around its growing hotels unit, was answered by CEO Luis Maroto, who said that "if there is something that makes sense and is the right price we will always be open to that but what we have is quite good."
He did offer an update on its $830 million acquisition of Navitaire, announced this July. It is likely to close in the first quarter of 2016, rather than the fourth quarter of 2015 as previously noted. Maroto is unconcerned by the delay, saying that authorities in USA and Brazil had approved the deal.
"We're dealing with the European competition authorities now so the timing is out of our hands. There's always the chance it will happen before, or a bit later." he said.
https://www.tnooz.com/article/amadeus-acquires-navitaire-an-airline-hosting-firm-for-830m/
The headline financial figures show that, revenues are up 14.7% to €2,964.8 million with EBITDA, excluding the costs associated with buying Navitaire and i:FAO, climbed 10.6%, to €1,149.6 million.
Click here to see the official results release