It was a decent Monday morning for Easyjet PLC (LON:EZJ) shareholders, with a recommendation upgrade from a top French broker and solid passenger statistics for February boosting the share price.
Shares were up 19p, or 2%, to 975p in early deals on Monday.
The stats for last month showed an 8% year-on-year rise in passenger numbers to a shade over 5.3mln passengers, while the all-important load factor which measures how full the planes are jumped 1.6 percentage points to 92%.
Over a rolling 12-month period (i.e. February 2016 to February 2017), the low-cost airline carried 75mln passengers across its 874 routes; 7% more than it did in the previous year.
Load factor across the year-long period was unchanged at 91.6%.
Also buoying the share price was the upgrade from Kepler Cheuvreux, with the French broker saying it prefers Easyjet to its Irish rival Ryanair Holdings PLC (LON:RYA) for the first since it started covering the stocks three years ago.
Analyst Ruxandra Haradau-Doser reckons Easyjet was “over-proportionally impacted” by last year’s terrorist attacks, while she also expects pricing trends to improve significantly over summer.
Restructurings at Gatwick should also yield “positive surprises” in terms of easyJet’s cost structure, Haradau-Doser adds, while there also might be a Brexit boost for the carrier.
“easyJet currently owns 74% of its fleet. Aircraft are US dollar denominated and the currency movements have significantly increased the value of easyJet’s fleet in British pounds,” the analyst said.
“We think that easyJet should trade at least at the value of its fleet. Based on our analysis, we estimate the value of easyJet’s owned fleet at £4.2bn.”
As a result, the broker has upped its recommendation from ‘hold’ to ‘buy’, while it has also raised its target price from £10.53 to £11.06; an upside of almost 15%.