Japan, Middle East burden Lufthansa profits

Flight cancellations due to Japan's nuclear plant crisis and North Africa's political turmoil have hit Lufthansa's earnings significantly, its finance director told a local newspaper.

"Those cost us a low three-digit million euro range at the pretax level," Stephan Gemkow said..

"We can no longer recover that in the course of the year," he added.

For the second quarter, he added, Lufthansa would post a profit. It is due to publish quarterly results on July 28.

Despite the flight cancellations, he confirmed the forecast for this year.

"We are satisfied with our outlook for 2011," he said. "We continue to expect that our earnings and sales would be better than 2010. But developing the fantasy these could climb even further has now been significantly curtailed."

He said he was pleased with the June number of passengers in Europe, noting measures the airline had taken would make regional operations overall profitable from 2013.

He said despite hedging measures, fuel costs were expected at €6.5 billion ($9.19 billion) this year, up from €5.16bn last year.