Virgin boss Hrdlicka eyes IPO window, ‘no rush’ to float
Virgin Australia chief executive Jayne Hrdlicka says there is “no pressure” when it comes to timing the airline’s plan to go public, dismissing the arrival of aviation’s super profits era as the upshot of typically cyclical airline earnings.
She unveiled new investments in the airline’s plane fleet at the weekend to step up the competition with Qantas on domestic routes, where Virgin unseated Qantas’ dominance over Sydney-Melbourne traffic in May, as it competes harder for business travellers.
Virgin’s newest 737-MAX Monkey Mia arrives at the airline’s Brisbane hangar on Saturday. Glenn Campbell
Ms Hrdlicka said Virgin needed to stay focused on delivering sustainable profits and “rationally rebuilding the industry for the long term”.
“We’re in a very high inflationary environment and we’ve been through a really difficult period,” she told The Australian Financial Review, with a nod to parent Bain acquiring the airline from administrators less than three years ago.
Ms Hrdlicka said Virgin had one year of profitability, and while she “wouldn’t call them super profits”, the airline was “doing a really good job rebuilding the business and rebuilding it for the long term”.
“The dynamic at play in aviation is [and] has always been the same, which is you have ups and downs, and the downs are pretty punishing,” she said. “And the ups are always moderated and fleeting, so I don’t really buy into the notion [of super profits].”
In May, Virgin’s shareholders, substantially represented by the US private equity firm, pocketed a $730 million capital return that extended to Virgin’s 7000 employees, nearly all of whom received some form of bonus. Virgin made $2.5 billion in revenue in the six months to December 31 on a profit margin of
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