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Air Canada sees revenue growth in international markets beyond U.S.
Air Canada sees revenue growth in international markets beyond U.S.

Hamilton Spectator

time7 hours ago

  • Business
  • Hamilton Spectator

Air Canada sees revenue growth in international markets beyond U.S.

Air Canada says it has been shifting capacity toward high-demand international markets as Canadians' appetite for cross-border travel continues to lag. Passenger revenues from the airline's U.S. transborder segment dropped 11 per cent during the three months ended June 30 compared to last year, to $961 million, while domestic, Atlantic and Latin American markets saw a boost. 'This second quarter was not business as usual,' chief commercial officer Mark Galardo told analysts on a conference call Tuesday. 'We navigated through a period of significant economic and geopolitical uncertainty and we contended with reduced demand for transborder travel, an evolving geopolitical landscape affecting the Middle East and India, increased competition in China-Hong Kong and some currency fluctuations.' The Trump administration's tariff threats, immigration crackdowns and musings about annexing Canada have prompted many Canadians to shun U.S. travel. The decline has shown up in Statistics Canada data. Last month, the agency said Canadian-resident returns from the United States by air declined more than 24 per cent in May compared to the same month a year earlier, continuing a five-month downward trend. Returning automobile traffic was down 38 per cent year-over-year in May. 'We made the right early calls to match our capacity to the evolving demand landscape, and our diversified network and disciplined capacity management supported strong performance in international overall,' said Galardo. Domestic routes saw a three per cent boost in revenues during the quarter. 'We kept a strong and steady presence and offered more options for travellers to explore the country, increasing capacity on key leisure destinations,' Galardo said. Capacity has also shifted from the transborder market to sun destinations going into the second half of the year. Galardo added the airline is closely monitoring the Canada-U.S. sector and has the flexibility to adjust to changing market conditions. Air Canada shares dropped almost 15 per cent in afternoon trading on the TSX to $18.82 after it reported a drop in second-quarter profits that missed analyst expectations. The airline reported net income of $186 million in the period, down from $410 million in the same quarter last year. Air Canada says that on an adjusted basis, it had a net income of $207 million in the quarter compared with $369 million in the same quarter last year. Adjusted earnings worked out to 60 cents per diluted share in the quarter, compared to 98 cents per share last year. Analysts on average had expected an adjusted profit of 72 cents per diluted share, according to LSEG Data & Analytics. Passenger revenues in the quarter amounted to $5.03 billion, up one per cent from last year on 2.5 per cent capacity growth. Despite the challenges, the airline reaffirmed its financial guidance for the year that it issued in May. Results were slightly below expectations on higher-than-expected costs but overall fairly neutral, said RBC analyst James McGarragle in a note. 'We are taking a neutral view on the results, as the broader narrative of demand recovery and operational realignment remains intact despite the modest cost-related headwinds in the quarter.' This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 29, 2025. Companies in this story: (TSX: AC)

U.S. hurricane forecasters losing critical access to government data
U.S. hurricane forecasters losing critical access to government data

Hindustan Times

time11 hours ago

  • Climate
  • Hindustan Times

U.S. hurricane forecasters losing critical access to government data

* U.S. hurricane forecasters losing critical access to government data U.S. to suspend data sharing from three meteorological satellites after July * Data loss hinders ability to monitor hurricanes accurately * Hurricane forecasters left using half of previous remote sensing data By Rachel Parsons LOS ANGELES, - Nine months after Hurricane Helene ripped through Shirley Scholl's home in Florida, inundating it with four feet of storm surge and sewage, her family can finally see some rebuilding progress. Crews working on the skinny island of Clearwater Beach just off the coast have started to elevate the remains of the structure more than 13 feet to meet new federal building regulations in response to the devastating hurricane. The disaster in September 2024 killed at least 250 people and caused nearly $79 billion in damages, making it the deadliest hurricane in the U.S. in 20 years, according to the National Weather Service. "We had to take everything in the whole house down to the studs," said Lisa Avram, Scholl's daughter, who is overseeing the reconstruction. But as families rebuild from last year's storms, this year's Atlantic hurricane season is underway, with even more risk than before. Not only do forecasters warn it will likely be busier than average, with three to five "major" hurricanes predicted, but the job of forecasting has become more challenging. The U.S. Department of Defense last month surprised hurricane forecasters by announcing it was suspending data sharing from three of its meteorological satellites, cutting the available data that meteorologists use by about half. The data sharing has helped forecasters accurately pinpoint the size, location and intensity of hurricanes for two decades. "It's all sorts of problematic," said Michael Lowry, a hurricane specialist with television station WPLG in Miami, Florida, and formerly of the National Hurricane Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration . NOAA issued an internal message announcing the service would end no later than June 30. After a last minute intervention by the space agency NASA, NOAA announced the service would extend until no later than July 31 and was being suspended to "mitigate a significant cybersecurity risk." "[The data sets] were really important for telling us how strong a hurricane currently is, but also how strong it might get," Lowry said. These are not run-of-the-mill satellites tracking things from high above the clouds as seen on radar images but operate in low polar orbits using microwaves to 'see into' a hurricane in ways other satellites cannot, according to Lowry. Without them, the ability for forecasters to issue early warnings is hobbled, he said. "With less time to prepare for a hurricane, people can't evacuate. You have a lot more people and lives that are at risk," Lowry said, adding that emergency management services cannot pre-position resources such as search-and-rescue teams that look for survivors. The loss of data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program means the amount of remote sensing information forecasters can access drops by half, Lowry said. With three fewer government satellites available to forecasters, the remaining satellites may only produce information on a strengthening hurricane every six to 12 hours instead of every few hours, giving storms a much bigger window to grow without being observed, he said. Traditional satellites offer limited detail during the day and produce even less at night. "The concern is what many in our community would call a 'sunrise surprise,' where you go to bed at eight o'clock at night and it's a tropical storm," Lowry said. "And we wake up in the morning and it's on the doorstep, and it's a Category Three or Four hurricane," he said. 'GIANT LOSS' Thousands of miles from the tropical hurricane zone, sea ice is closely tracked by the DMSP satellites as well. Climatologists who study polar sea ice and climate change have used these data sets for decades, said Zachary Labe, a climate scientist at the nonprofit research organization Climate Central. Losing access is "quite shocking," Labe said. "These satellites … have really told the story of Arctic climate change for the last almost five decades now," he said. "It's been a real key data for cryosphere science," allowing observation of long-term sea ice variability and trends, he added. Coastal communities such as those in Alaska rely on sea ice information to help prepare for storms and flooding and make decisions about transportation and hunting. Labe said other satellites controlled by countries such as Japan have the same capability. But Japan's systems have not been operating as long, and now there is a "scramble" to match timelines of different satellites so there is no gap in the record. Climate scientists need "more data, not less," and the satellites served a wide variety of climate research, he said. "It's a giant loss," Labe said. A U.S. Navy spokesperson confirmed in an email that DMSP data sharing would end on July 31. The DMSP is scheduled to be discontinued altogether in September 2026," given it "no longer meets our information technology modernization requirements," according to the spokesperson. In Florida, Lisa Avram and her family live day-to-day on tenterhooks. Losing satellite information seems like a "seriously dangerous proposition" for herself and other storm survivors who have their houses in various phases of the elevation. "We're in hurricane season, so when your house is up in the air, they're even more dangerous because they're not secured," she said. "I worry every time the wind blows here if my mom's house is going to be OK." This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.

Paul Coulson: The high-wire financier who cut his teeth restructuring the Trinity Ball
Paul Coulson: The high-wire financier who cut his teeth restructuring the Trinity Ball

Irish Times

time20 hours ago

  • Business
  • Irish Times

Paul Coulson: The high-wire financier who cut his teeth restructuring the Trinity Ball

Financier Paul Coulson built Ardagh Group into a big force in glass and metal packaging by being one of the most nimble Irish movers in high finance over the past 25 years – funding well-timed acquisitions with even better-timed forays into the high-cost global junk bond markets. At its peak, Ardagh Group had a market valuation of $6.7 billion (€5.8 billion) four years ago, before it was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. That put Coulson's indirect 36 per cent stake at $2.4 billion. Yet Coulson's high-wire financing would ultimately catch up with him. The total $12.5 billion of borrowings Ardagh Group was ultimately left carrying became too much to bear as it grappled in recent years with inflation, soaring interest rates and soft consumer demand on both sides of the Atlantic. It led to a major restructuring – unveiled on Monday after months of tough negotiations with various classes of creditors – that will see a bunch off bondholders take control of the group in a debt-for-equity swap. [ Paul Coulson faces last stand in battle to retain control of Ardagh Opens in new window ] Coulson, former and current managers and a small group of investors – believed to run into hundreds – who stayed with the company for more than two decades, after its previous life on the Dublin stock market, will share $300 million (€249 million) of go-away money. It may be hard to feel sorry for them. It is understood that Ardagh Group's soon-to-be former shareholders will have shared in excess of $2 billion over the years by the time they exit – between debt-fuelled dividends and share buybacks, a windfall from the sale of the leasehold on its original base in Dublin 's Ringsend just before the 2008 property crash, and the $300 million pay-off. Coulson, known to friends as the Cooler from his university days, has been the main beneficiary. The businessman cut his teeth in the world of commerce by restructuring the finances of the Trinity Ball in the early 1970s while at college. The Dubliner started his career as an accountant with Craig Gardner (now part of PwC) in London. In 1982 he set up Yeoman International, an aircraft leasing and investment firm, where he executed a deal six years later that he would regret. After Yeoman International forked out £93 million sterling for CLF Holdings, a British leasing company to small businesses, it quickly became apparent that it had bought a dud. Bad debts in a unit of the company soared as the UK economy soured. Coulson turned on his advisers on the deal, merchant bank SG Warburg. He sued the bank and secured an out-of-court settlement of £35 million. In targeting a business more than six times the size of Ardagh by value, Coulson set the funding template for what would underpin billions of euro of subsequent deals: leverage Soon after, the Irish Glass Bottle Company, which traced its roots to 1932, was in his sights. He bought an initial stake and took over as chairman in 1998. Within a year he started off on a road to transform the sleepy company – by then renamed Ardagh Plc – with a single glass plant in Dublin and its two furnaces through the acquisition of Rockware, then Britain's largest glass bottle maker, for £247 million. In targeting a business more than six times the size of Ardagh by value, Coulson set the funding template for what would underpin billions of euro of subsequent deals: leverage. Some 375 workers at the Irish Glass Bottle plant lost their jobs when Coulson closed the facility in 2002. The following year, he engineered a deal that would split the group in two. Ardagh Glass, a company he subsequently used to build his glass and drink cans empire, was taken private. The other, South Wharf, remained listed, with one major asset: the leasehold on the 24-acre glass bottle site in Dublin. South Wharf and its shareholders went on to share two-thirds of the €411 million proceeds from the sale of the site as the property boom neared its peak, in 2006. Almost two decades later, the site is finally under construction. Ardagh Group's largest deal was its $3.4 billion purchase in 2016 of a bunch of beverage can manufacturing plants that US packaging group Ball Corp and UK peer Rexam were forced to sell to get competition authorities to allow their merger. Coulson secured a New York listing for that unit, called Ardagh Metal Packaging (AMP), in 2021, leaving Ardagh Group with a 76 per cent stake. He delisted Ardagh Group, the parent company, the same year – as equity markets were prepared to give metal packaging businesses a higher valuation than glass. AMP, whose sales and earnings have recovered strongly in recent quarters, even as the glass business remains under pressure, became the centre of a major battle in recent months. Originally, Coulson wanted to give bondholders control of the struggling glass business, while he and other legacy investors would retain an 80 per cent stake in AMP. Talks along those lines broke down in late May. The final accord will see Coulson – who has extensive other assets – hand over 92.5 per cent of the group to senior unsecured creditors, who are owed $2.39 billion, and 7.5. per cent to a group of lower-ranking debt investors, known as payment-in-kind not holders. They are owed $1.98 billion. Major bondholders that are set to become shareholders include: California-based Franklin Templeton, which is best known from taking a major bet on Irish government bonds at the height of the financial crisis; Wall Street giant JP Morgan; and New York-based Monarch Alternative Capital. The restructuring is expected to be completed by the end of September. Coulson might have gone down the legal route to assert rights over AMP, as it was a so-called unrestricted subsidiary of Ardagh Group, separated by a holding company that was set up in April 2022. In the end he opted for a consensual arrangement with the $300 million pay-off. The deal also avoids a change of control at the AMP level within the group, which would have resulted in its own $3.69 billion of bond debt automatically falling due for repayment.

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