SATA is on a “consistent path of improvement”

The outgoing president of SATA, Teresa Gonçalves, stated today that the company is “managing to grow a lot in revenue” and is on a “consistent path of improvement”, based on the results for the first quarter of the year.

“In general, SATA is on a good trajectory and is effectively managing to grow, achieving revenue, managing to grow a lot in revenue”, said Teresa Gonçalves to the Lusa agency, on her last day as president of the Board of Directors of the group of public aviation of the Azores.

The airlines of the SATA Group (Azores Airlines/SATA Internacional and SATA Air Açores) continued in the first quarter of 2024 the growth trajectory of passengers and revenue and together reached 68.9 million euros (ME), in a year-on-year growth of 24%, was announced today.

At Azores Airlines, responsible for the archipelago’s connections with the outside world and currently in the privatization process, net results in that period amounted to negative 25.6 ME (compared to negative 22.7 ME in the same period last year) and at SATA Air Açores, which makes connections between islands were also negative 4.7 ME (which represents an improvement of 2.3 ME compared to the same period in 2023).

According to the president of SATA who leaves office today, the company’s costs “are more challenging”.

“The operation, the context in which we operate, also creates these challenges, because, apparently, we operate with very adverse weather conditions, we often have to cancel flights, we have to replace flights, we have to postpone flights. Therefore, this, apparently not, creates a lot of constraints for us here,” she explained.

Furthermore, he added, there are few planes and if one or two suffer any operational irregularity, the situation could destabilize the entire network.

“Nevertheless, I think we are on a growth path, we are on a consistent path of improvement and results and we are satisfied with these first quarter results. Obviously, it would be much better if we had more positive results, but in fact, given the quarter it is, and given the conditions we had, because this year we were hit hard by bad weather, […] We ended up having good results”, he admitted.

Speaking to Lusa accompanied by financial administrator Dinis Modesto, who also leaves office today, Teresa Gonçalves said they were both “very hopeful”, including a set of new routes.

“We have Milan, which has very interesting demand, and therefore the expectation is that it will be a winning bet. We have Faro, which is also a very interesting search. […] We reinforced Montreal, we reinforced flights in Boston”, he pointed out.

From his perspective, this year’s summer will be interesting in terms of demand.

Teresa Gonçalves, who was president of SATA for a year, recalled that the aviation group has “everything to now be able to evolve well”, especially because in 2023 it was “above the restructuring plan that had been approved by the European Commission”.

“And now it’s time to continue working in this direction. Obviously, you cannot recover a company that is in great difficulty like SATA overnight. This is impossible. There are many years of bad practices, there are many years of accumulated debts and, therefore, this effectively takes time, but we will get there”, he concluded.

Teresa Gonçalves took office as president of Grupo SATA in April 2023, after the departure of Luís Rodrigues to lead TAP.

On April 9, the Regional Government announced that Teresa Gonçalves resigned from her position for “personal reasons”.

PUB