The Czech company Kiwi.com, which deals with ticket sales, increased its loss by half last year to 19.6 million euros, roughly 468 million crowns.
It has been in the red for the last four years, i.e. including the pre-covid year 2019, and the total loss over the last few years amounts to almost two billion crowns.
The company ended up in a loss last year, despite the fact that the market experienced a significant recovery in the first quarter after the covid pandemic, and last year’s revenue for tickets sold was a record 2.1 billion euros in the ten years of its existence, i.e. about fifty billion crowns.
The management of the company does not expect to be profitable even this year with further growth in sales. According to the information in the annual report, it expects this to happen in 2025. The company also assumes that its capital, which was negative at the end of last year, will be able to return to positive numbers.
The company’s economy was the worst in the first year of covid, i.e. in 2020, when the loss exceeded one billion crowns.
Last year’s operating loss amounted to 144 million crowns and was lower than a year earlier. The company’s personnel costs increased year-on-year from 646 million to 1.1 billion crowns, and it spent three times the expenses on marketing as well.
The Czech state subsidy of 50 million crowns to compensate for operating costs did not help the better economic result either.
The company employs 1100 people worldwide, the main branch is located in Brno. It was established in 2012, its co-founder was Oliver Dlouhý, who still owns twenty-two percent of the shares and is also the CEO.
The company operates in the global market and from the beginning has tried to differentiate itself from the competition by offering cheap tickets thanks to its search algorithm and a combination of non-cooperating airlines. Last year, it sold an average of 70,000 airplane seats per day.
In 2019, the American investment fund General Atlantic joined the company, which today owns 53.5 percent of the shares.
2023-07-07 14:39:57
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