Amadeus reports revenue growth of 12.8% to €5.57 billion for the full-year 2019, overcoming many challenges such as the grounding of the Boeing 737 Max and the demise of Thomas Cook.
In 2020, its biggest challenge could potentially be the COVID-19 coronavirus.
In a call to discuss 2019 earnings and its guidance for 2020, Amadeus president and CEO Luis Maroto says that the company is “observing the underlying growth of the GDS industry to be trending between 10% and 15% negative points below pre-virus levels.”
He adds that the company is also seeing between 7% and 10% blended traffic daily declines in organic passengers boarded by airlines using both of its platforms.
“We do expect the coronavirus to have a negative impact on air traffic and the GPS industry during the duration of the health episode,” says Maroto.
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“However, we also suspect this negative impact to be followed by a recovery and therefore to be a one-off episode.”
Marato adds that at this stage “it is too early to understand the duration of or severity or the coronavirus outbreak in China.”
“It is impossible to quantify what the coronavirus impact is going to be in 2020.”
The Madrid, Spain-based global travel giant projects a 1% year-over-year growth in air traffic, based on IATA’s global forecast with COVID-19.
“We will expect distribution revenue to not grow and remain broadly flat during the year,” says Maroto.
Financials
Amadeus reports growth across all segments for 2019.
EBITDA grew by 10% to €2.24 billion in 2019, with adjusted profit growing 13.4% to €1.27 billion.
In its distribution segment, overall travel agency bookings rose by 0.5% to 646.6 million and revenue grew by 4.2% to €3.13 billion.
Excluding India, global air bookings increased by 2.7%, with North America seeing the largest increase at 9.7%.
Higher usage in hotel, rail and car pushed non-air bookings to tick up by 5.1% in 2019.
In the IT solutions segment, revenue increased by 26.2% to €2.44 billion and passengers boarded rose by 7.5%.
Amadeus attributed the growth in IT solutions to its new businesses, including the consolidation of TravelClick.
“Our business demonstrated resilience in 2019 through constant innovation, diversification and the strengthening of our existing businesses,” says Maroto.