Emirates Group announced on Tuesday its first annual loss in over 30 years caused by a significant drop in revenue, fully attributed to the impact of Covid-19 related flight and travel restrictions throughout its entire financial year 2020-21.

The airline’s  2020-21 Annual Report shows the Emirates Group posted a loss of AED22.1 billion (USD 6.0 billion) for the financial year ended 31 March 2021 compared with an AED1.7 billion (USD456 million) profit for last year. The group’s revenue was AED35.6 billion (USD9.7 billion), a decline of 66% over last year’s results. The group’s cash balance was AED19.8 billion (USD5.4 billion), down 23% from last year, mainly due to weak demand caused by the various pandemic related business and travel restrictions across all of the group’s core business divisions and markets.

Emirates Airline and Group chairman and chief executive Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum said: “The Covis-19 pandemic continues to take a tremendous toll on human lives, communities, economies, and on the aviation and travel industry. In 2020-21, Emirates and dnata were hit hard by the drop in demand for international air travel as countries closed their borders and imposed stringent travel restrictions.

“Our top priorities throughout the year were: the health and wellbeing of our people and customers, preserving cash and controlling costs, and restoring our operations safely and sustainably. Emirates received a capital injection of AED11.3 billion (USD3.1 billion) from our ultimate shareholder, the Government of Dubai, and dnata tapped on various industry support programmes and availed a total relief of nearly AED 800 million in 2020-21. These helped us sustain operations and retain the vast majority of our talent pool. Unfortunately, we still had to make the difficult decision to resize our workforce in line with reduced operational requirements.”