At the first-quarter results, Lufthansa Group told the market that jet fuel would cost it €1.7 billion more in 2026 than in 2025, and that it still expected Adjusted EBIT significantly above the €1,960 million it earned last year. On August 4 it revised the fuel number down. The 2026 fuel bill now runs to €8.46 billion on the group’s own forward-curve estimate, cut from the €8.9 billion it had modelled three months earlier, per Reuters’ reporting of both prints.
Guidance went the other way. Full-year Adjusted EBIT is now a range of €1.7 to €2.2 billion, and the midpoint of that range is last year.
Second-quarter Adjusted EBIT came in at €383 million against €870 million, a 3.4 percent margin where the group ran 8.4 percent a year ago. Consensus, polled on July 16 across fifteen houses, sat at €401 million. Revenue came in ahead of it — €11,141 million against €11,119 million. So the shortfall was not on the demand side. It sat in the cost base and in the equity investments, in the quarter that is meant to pay for the year.
Fuel is the reason the company gives and the reason the wires ran with. It is not the number that moved.
Brent averaged $87.44 a barrel in the first half, 24 percent above the same period of 2025. Kerosene averaged $1,133.90 a tonne, up 60 percent. The spread between them, the jet fuel crack, averaged $56.92 a barrel against $18.94. That is a rise of 201 percent.
Crude was expensive. The premium for turning it into jet fuel roughly tripled while the barrel itself gained under a quarter. Airlines buy the refined product, so the crack is the number that reaches the P&L, and a hedge book weighted toward Brent does very little about it.
Lufthansa’s own quarterly split shows how cleanly the shock arrived. First-quarter fuel expense was €1,570 million, €109 million below the same quarter of 2025. Second-quarter fuel was €2,606 million, 40 percent above. Nothing about the group’s cost base changed between March and April. The refining margin did.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.