Tokyo October 29, 2004 -- ANA Group today announced its financial results for the first six months of fiscal 2004 (April 1 – September 30), posting a consolidated net profit of ¥29.8 billion, up ¥9.3 billion or 45.3% compared with the same period last year, and marking a fifth successive quarter of profitable operations.

Revenue for the period was ¥659.4 billion, operating profit ¥59.7 billion and recurring profit ¥53.1 billion. These figures show a significant year-on-year improvement of ¥51.1 billion, ¥45.3 billion and ¥38.7 billion, respectively.

The ANA Group is comprised of more than 100 air transportation, travel-related and other businesses. On a consolidated air transportation segment basis, a revenue of ¥546.5 billion and an operating profit of ¥54.1 billion were posted for the six-month period. The five airlines within ANA Group* carried 24.5 million passengers over 29.2 billion Revenue Passenger Kilometers (RPK), which breaks down into 22.5 million domestic and 2 million international passengers over 19.6 billion RPKs and 9.6 billion RPKs respectively.

The entire network performed well, with Europe and North America routes producing particularly strong results, as evidenced by an average load factor in excess of 80%. Leisure travel demand to China returned to pre-SARS levels from the summer; business demand had rebounded strongly at the end of the crisis last year. Overall, a 36.6% increase in passenger numbers and a ¥24.4 billion increase in revenue were reported for Chinese routes compared with the previous year.

Domestically, passenger numbers were down 1.3% as ANA cut the number of available seats by 4.7%; however, revenues rose by 2.5 % or ¥8.3 billion yen year-on-year. Among other factors, this can largely be attributed to the introduction of the FAM (Fleet Assignment Model) system, which matches aircraft-size to passenger demand, and also to the Passenger Revenue Optimization System (PROS), which assigns fares per seat according to demand.

Despite revenue and passenger growth, rising oil prices will significantly increase ANA’s operating costs over the remainder of the financial year. Therefore no change will be made to the previously announced consolidated forecast for fiscal 2004 of a net profit of ¥14 billion, on revenue of ¥1.26 trillion and a recurring profit of ¥29.0 billion.

*ANA (All Nippon Airways), ANK (Air Nippon), AJX (Air Japan), A-Net (Air Nippon Network), ADK (Air Hokkaido)