: Southwest Airlines stock falls on Q1 top and bottom line miss

Southwest Airlines Co.’s LUV stock fell 1.3% in premarket trades Thursday after the company reported first-quarter earnings and revenue below Wall Street’s expectations. The carrier reported a net loss of $159 million, or an adjusted per-share loss of 27 cents, compared with a net loss of $278 million, or an adjusted per-share loss of 32 cents, in the prior year’s quarter. Analysts surveyed by FactSet were expecting a per-share loss of 23 cents. Southwest’s revenue rose 21.6% year-over-year to $5.71 billion, but was below the FactSet consensus of $5.73 billion. The company said that it suffered a negative financial impact of $380 million pre-tax, or $294 million after-tax, related to its December 2022 operational disruption. “The majority of this impact was driven by a negative revenue impact of approximately $325 million, as a result of cancellations of holiday return travel and a deceleration in bookings for January and February 2023 travel,” said Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan, in a statement. “Despite that, travel demand and revenue trends in March 2023 were strong and resulted in solid profitability for the month and record first quarter revenues.”

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