Wizz co-founder capitalises on share resurgence

Wizz’s co-founder and chief executive, József Varadi, decided to take advantage of the strong retracement, offloading around £6.4m worth of shares. This only represents a small portion of his overall holding, but existing shareholders may want to follow suit given wider industry challenges.

The latest load figures indicate that investors are placing a great deal of faith in the various vaccine programmes now underway – whether it is undue faith remains to be seen.

Passenger numbers in February were just over a tenth of the level recorded during the same month last year, while the carrier's load factor – the percentage of available seating capacity that has been filled with passengers – contracted 24 percentage points to 69.8 per cent.

It is difficult to determine what constitutes a favourable return given the unprecedented level of disruption, particularly as capacity had returned to 70 per cent of the 2019 rate during the three months to the end of October. The resurgence of the virus, and the resultant lockdowns, put paid to any further recovery, but none of this seems to have put much of a dampener on the company’s growth ambitions.

Early last month, the company announced the opening of its second base in Bosnia and Herzegovina, along with nine new destinations from Sarajevo with 21 weekly departures. The company also increased the size of its fleet by around 9 per cent through the delivery of Airbus A320neo family jets.

For Wizz and its industry peers, the worry is that some passengers will still be reluctant to take to the skies once the travel restrictions have either been relaxed or removed altogether. Prospects for civil aviation may have improved of late, but uncertainties predominate. Sell at 5,329p.     

Last IC view: Sell, 3,470p, 05 Nov 2020