easyJet flies more passengers on fuller planes in December

Budget airline easyJet managed to increase both its passenger numbers and load factor in last month, the company announced on Monday morning.

Passenger numbers, which represents the number of booked seats flown (irrespective of whether or not the customer turns up) increased by 4.9% to 4,339,836 in December 2012, compared with 4,135,562 the same month the year before.

This pushed up the rolling 12-month passenger number over 59m, up 6.7% year-on-year.

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Meanwhile, the load factor - a key measure that airlines use to calculate how full their planes are - improved by 2.3 percentage points (pp) from 85.6% in December 2011 to 87.9% last month. The rolling 12-month load factor rose 1.4pp to 88.9%.

The airline reported in November that full-year revenue for the year ended September 30th 2012 had risen 11.6% to £3,854m, while pre-tax profit jumped 27.9% to £317m, after an average 7.1% increase in passenger numbers over the period.

The company more than doubled its dividend per share to 21.5p.

easyJet, with a market capitalisation of around £3.23bn, has seen shares surge by around a third (+32.18%) over the last three months.