Japan Airlines April-June net profit down 31.9pc at $187mn

TOKYO: Japan Airlines (JAL) announced Wednesday that its net profit in the April-June quarter dropped 31.9 percent to 18.33 billion yen ($187 million), after rival All Nippon Airways reported a loss on soaring fuel costs.

JAL, which re-listed its shares in Tokyo last year after a high-profile bankruptcy restructuring, reported sales of 294.1 billion yen, up 2.6 percent on-year.

While the carrier did not give specific reasons for the weaker profit, a sharp decline in the yen has pushed up the price of dollar-denominated fuel, which is a major expense for airlines. The four-month grounding of Boeing's Dreamliner also hit Japan's two biggest airlines hard, with ANA saying Tuesday that the crisis had helped drag it to a 6.6 billion yen loss for the three months to June.

For the fiscal year to March 2014 JAL kept its previous forecast unchanged, at a predicted net profit of 118 billion yen on sales of 1.272 trillion yen.