The Emirates Group has posted a loss of AED22.1 billion (€4.9 billion) for the financial year ended 31 March 2021 compared with an AED 1.7 billion (€382 million) profit for last year. The Group’s revenue was AED 35.6 billion (€7.9 billion), a decline of 66 per cent over last year’s results.
It still leaves the group with a cash balance of AED 19.8 billion (€4.4 billion), albeit down 23 per cent from last year mainly due to weak demand caused by the various pandemic related business and travel restrictions across all of the Group’s core business divisions and markets.
Chairman and Chief Executive of Emirates Airline and Group Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum said: “The COVID-19 pandemic continues to take a tremendous toll on human lives, communities, economies, and on the aviation and travel industry.
“In 2020-21, Emirates and dnata were hit hard by the drop in demand for international air travel as countries closed their borders and imposed stringent travel restrictions.
“Our top priorities throughout the year were: the health and wellbeing of our people and customers, preserving cash and controlling costs, and restoring our operations safely and sustainably.
“Emirates received a capital injection of AED 11.3 billion (€2.5 billion) from our ultimate shareholder, the Government of Dubai, and dnata tapped on various industry support programmes and availed a total relief of nearly AED 800 million in 2020-21. These helped us sustain operations and retain the vast majority of our talent pool. Unfortunately, we still had to make the difficult decision to resize our workforce in line with reduced operational requirements.”
For the first time in the Group’s history, redundancies were implemented across all parts of the business. As a result, the Group’s total workforce reduced by 31 per cent to 75,145 employees, representing over 160 different nationalities.
