Czech ticketing company Kiwi.com has halved its loss to EUR 19.6 million (CZK 468 million) last year. It has been in the red for the last four years, including the pre-Christmas year 2019, and the total loss for those years amounts to almost CZK 2 billion. This is according to the annual reports in the Collection of Deeds. The company ended in the red last year despite the market seeing a strong recovery in the first quarter after the covid pandemic and last year’s revenue from tickets sold was a record 2.1 billion euros (CZK 50 billion) in its ten years of existence.
The company’s management does not expect to turn a profit this year either if sales continue to grow. According to the information in the annual report, it expects to do so in 2025. Similarly, the company expects its capital, which was negative at the end of last year, to return to positive figures. The company’s performance was the worst in the first covid year, i.e. in 2020, when the loss exceeded CZK 1 billion.
Operating loss was six million euros (CZK 144 million), lower than a year earlier. The firm’s personnel costs rose year-on-year from €27m to €44m (CZK646m to CZK1.1bn), while marketing spending tripled to €60m (CZK1.4bn). The better economic result was not helped by the Czech state subsidy of EUR 2.1 million (CZK 50 million) to compensate for operating costs.
The company employs 1,100 people worldwide, with its main office in Brno. The company was founded in 2012 by Oliver Dlouhý, who still owns 22 percent of the shares and is the CEO. The company operates in a global market and from the beginning has sought to differentiate itself from competitors by offering a combination of non-cooperative airlines through its search algorithm. Last year, it sold an average of 70,000 seats per day.
In 2019, US hedge fund General Atlantic entered the company, which now owns 53.5 percent of the shares.
Source: CTK
