British Airways World Cargo revenues rise to £631.3 million (29/05/2001)

British Airways World Cargo has reported revenues of £631.3 million for the financial year ended 31 March 2001. This is a rise of £46.4 million (7.9%) from the previous year.

The volume of cargo carried across the airline's international network rose to 907,435 tonnes from 896,906 network travelled tonnes in 1999/2000.

Gareth Kirkwood, Managing Director, British Airways World Cargo said: "This is an encouraging increase in our revenues in what has been a challenging year for the business."

The increase in revenues comes despite substantial softening in the marketplace, particularly the United States, in the second half of the year. The market downturn has been partially counteracted by deploying additional freighter capacity in Southern and Pacific regions. The company has also suffered from increased costs due to the shift from wide to narrow-bodied aircraft on a number of European routes, which has necessitated an increase in British Airways World Cargo's trucking programme in Europe.

Kirkwood added: "During the year since I joined British Airways World Cargo, we have made a number of organisational changes to our Commercial and Operational teams to give the business a much clearer, customer-oriented focus. Key to this has been the creation of a team of Global Key Account Managers, reporting to Keith Packer, Senior Manager Global Sales and Marketing. Their remit is to build much closer relationships with our customers and enhance our service offering to ensure it meets their needs.

"In January 2001, we completed the migration of our business from our old hub into Ascentis, and are now seeing significant improvements in our global flown as booked performance and London Heathrow customer engagement times.

"Going forward we have five key strategic focus areas for the next two years:

• To deliver reliable, world class operational performance
• To maximise the capability of the new business we have built around Ascentis
• To reposition our product portfolio to capitalise on our capability
• To build closer links with customers that are built on service quality and the new products
• To reduce unit costs and improve productivity.

"Now that we are achieving significantly better stability in our performance, we want to utilise the capability of Ascentis by focusing on higher yielding loose business. In line with this, we will be repositioning our product portfolio later in the year to capitalise on our capabilities and provide all our customers with a truly reliable, world-class service."

British Airways World Cargo Results at 31 March 2001

	2000/2001	1999/2000
Revenue	£631.3 million	£584.9 million
Total Tonnage	907,000kg (Freight, courier, mail)	897,000kg