聯合航空 (UAL) 2017 Q2 法說會逐字稿

Good morning, and welcome to United Continental Holdings Earnings Conference Call for the Second Quarter of 2017.

My name is Brandon, and I'll be your conference facilitator today.

(Operator Instructions) This call is being recorded and is copyrighted.

Please note that no portion of the call may be recorded, transcribed or rebroadcast without the company's permission.

Your participation implies your consent to our recording of this call.

If you do not agree with these terms, simply drop off the line.

I will now turn the presentation over to your host for today's call, Julie Stewart, Managing Director of Investor Relations.

Please go ahead, Julie.

Thank you, Brandon.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to United's Second Quarter 2017 Earnings Conference Call.

Yesterday, we issued our earnings release and separate investor update.

Additionally, this morning, we issued a presentation to accompany this call.

All 3 of these documents are available on our website at ir.united.com.

Information in yesterday's release and investor update, the accompanying presentation and the remarks made during this conference call may contain forward-looking statements, which represent the company's current expectations or beliefs concerning future events and financial performance.

All forward-looking statements are based upon information currently available to the company.

A number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations.

Please refer to our press release, Form 10-K and other reports filed with the SEC by United Continental Holdings and United Airlines for a more thorough description of these factors.

Also during the course of our call, we will discuss several non-GAAP financial measures.

For reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to GAAP measures, please refer to the tables at the end of our earnings release and investor update, copies of which are available on our website.

Joining us here in Chicago to discuss our results are: Chief Executive Officer, Oscar Munoz; President, Scott Kirby; and Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Andrew Levy.

In addition, we have Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Greg Hart; and Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer, Andrew Nocella in the room, available to assist with the Q&A.

And now I'd like to turn the call over to Oscar.

Thank you, Julie, and good morning.

Welcome to a terrific second quarter, strong financial results and even more incredible operational results.

And the developments that we've seen today and frankly have seen over the past couple of quarters across the board are not only, obviously, the direct result of a lot of our great employees, but also the leadership in this room.

And I think it is a direct result of the work we've done in so many areas to reengage the United family for both our customers and for our employees.

And so as we think about customers, I want to thank them for their continued loyalty and support.

We continue to find new and better ways to service them and make them more comfortable on our airline.

But we're here about the financials.

So on the financial side, turning to Slide 4, our earnings per share, excluding special charges, was 5.4% higher than last year at $2.75.

We reported pretax earnings of $1.3 billion with a pretax margin of 13.2%, both of those, of course, are excluding special charges.

Total revenue grew 6.4% in the second quarter, and this is the highest level of quarterly revenue that we've had since the fourth quarter of 2013.

Also in this quarter, we repurchased $422 million of stock at an average price of $74 per share.

Secondly, on the operational side, we finished this quarter as the #1 airline amongst our largest competitors in completion, on-time departures and on-time arrivals.

This is the first quarter United's operation has finished #1 among our peers since the merger, and we look forward to continuing to build on this momentum in the second half of the year.

We've also made meaningful strides in our executing on the 10 changes we announced in April on the customer service area and to better serve those customers and really empower our employees.

And so the initial results are very encouraging, specifically, around the issue of involuntary denied boardings.

Since we put different things into inception back in -- back a couple of months ago, we've achieved almost 85% reduction on -- in involuntary denied boardings.

So that's a good metric that we're monitoring across the board.

And it's important to, I think, make the point that these changes amount to a lot more than just a policy shift.

It really is more of a, if you'll allow me to use the term, paradigm shift, in our culture and mindset of our employees and our management.

So it's about providing our people with tools, but also the imperative to solve problems kind of in the moment for our customers.

And so we're excited about those developments, and you'll hear more coming from us soon.

And during the quarter, we also continued to execute on our strategic initiatives that we laid out at Investor Day last fall, with the primary objective of improving our absolute and relative margin performance.

We feel incredibly good that we're on the trajectory that we laid out at Investor Day and so it's a solid path for us that we're very excited about.

So with that, I'll turn it over to Scott to discuss both ops and the revenue environment.

Thank you, Oscar, and thanks to everyone for joining us today.

I'm going to start by talking about our operations.

With all the decks and slides that we've created in the past year, for those of us on the United team, this is probably our favorite.

You can clearly see that in the second quarter, United ran the very best operation amongst our largest competitors.

It was true across the board, with great departure performance, on-time arrivals, completion factor and mishandled baggage rate.

We just couldn't be more proud and thankful to the United team for the incredibly reliable operation.

And this improvement is coming from all parts of the company.

It starts with getting planes to the gate, ready to fly on time.

And while we don't traditionally show you a lot of tech ops statistics, our maintenance team is doing a great job with [margin] improvement and tech ops metrics than I recall seeing at any airline anytime, anywhere during my career.

At the airport, our agents and ramp team are turning airplanes and getting them out on time.

You can see our industry-leading departure performance.

But dig a little deeper and you'd find an almost 100% improvement in quick turn performance, and many other metrics showing huge year-over-year improvement.

Below the wing, our ramp team has set new records for mishandled bags in 22 of the last 24 months.

And once our customers get on the airplane, our flight attendants are just doing an incredible job.

In fact, we get more positive feedback on flight attendants than we get feedback on anything else.

That's an amazing statistic and a testament to our great flight attendants.

Our pilots are the day-to-day leaders of the airline on the front lines.

And without that frontline leadership, none of this will be possible.

And finally, our Network Operations Center has the most difficult job in the industry, given our hubs are located in the airports most likely to experience air traffic ground delay programs, and they do a phenomenal job quarterbacking the entire operation and quickly recovering after air traffic control or weather events.

I know some of the investors on this call are really more interested in what I'm going to talk about on revenue and tend to discount operational performance, but great operations are the foundation that a great financial airline is built upon.

First, over time, we'll win more customers by being the best operationally.

And even in the short term, our cabin performance is much better when we run good airline, as evidenced this quarter by our strong CASM results.

So thanks once again to the entire United team and to the operations leadership, led by Greg, who's here in the room with us today.

Turning now to the revenue environment.

Demand was solid.

We performed in line with our past year unit revenue forecast during the quarter despite softer-than-expected demand in the Pacific and despite higher year-over-year completion factor.

Kudos also to the cargo team for a 22% increase in revenue in the quarter, with an assist to the operations because one of the keys to winning cargo business is running a good operation and delivering that cargo on time.

Our consolidated PRASM was 2.1% higher year-over-year for the quarter, just above the midpoint of our guidance provided in April.

All entities, except the Pacific, were PRASM-positive in each month during the quarter.

Domestic revenues grew 2.4% year-over-year, a very solid result on 5.6% growth in ASMs.

Atlantic's performance of 3.3% was better than we forecasted, boosted by strong U.S. point-of-sale and healthy front cabin demand.

Latin PRASM grew 7.8% year-over-year, driven by the timing of Easter and strength in Brazil, Caribbean and Mexico beach markets, which more than offset our weak performance in the Mexico business markets.

PRASM in the Pacific was weaker than we initially expected and declined 5.5% this year, worsening from the decline in the first quarter.

This result was nearly 400 basis points worse than our initial expeditions due to softer demand in China and Hong Kong.

Looking forward, we anticipate third quarter consolidated PRASM to be about flat.

Domestically, we expect PRASM to be -- also to be about flat, given higher industry ASMs and shifts in holiday timing.

The domestic market has absorbed our growth well and we're pleased with the performance of our new summer flying from a revenue, operational and financial perspective.

The Atlantic PRASM is also expected to be flat as the demand pattern shifts to European point-of-sale in July and front cabin demand is depressed by European vacations in July and August, though that's being somewhat offset by a stronger euro.

The Pacific remains our most challenging region and probably the only region that we've seen an actual slowdown in demand, but we're hopeful that a reduction in industry capacity growth by the fourth quarter will help future PRASM results.

United's capacity growth slowed in the Pacific from 6% in the first half of the year to just under 1% in the second half of the year.

Additionally, we expect that retiring our 747 fleet, which we're sad to do, but it will help the second half profitability in the Pacific.

Latin PRASM remains a bright spot.

But the second quarter growth is likely the peak growth rate for PRASM during the year, given the Easter tailwind in 2Q.

As we get into the back half of the year, comps will start to get a little bit tougher as we lap the start of the Brazil recovery.

Turning to Slide 8, our capacity outlook for the third quarter is up approximately 4%.

As it was in the second quarter, we expect that growth to be biased towards higher domestic, with an increase of 5.5% to 6.5%.

Our full year outlook for system capacity growth stays the same at 2.5% to 3%, and is consistent with our guidance from March 15.

I think everyone probably knows this, but our capacity guidance is based on scheduled capacity.

In the first half of the year, our ASM growth ended up higher than we had originally expected as a result of higher completion factor.

And we couldn't be happier to see that because it means we're running a really good operation which is good for our customers and our investors.

If this trend does continue in the second half, our full year capacity gross will be towards the higher end of the range.

On Slide 9, we're delivering on our promises from the Investor Day, which include executing on all of our strategic initiatives.

In addition to the great progress we've made improving the operational integrity of the airline, we've rolled out Basic Economy fares across our mainland U.S. domestic system, and we're pleased with the initial results and operational benefits that come from having fewer gate-checked bags.

We continue to optimize our pricing strategies related to Basic Economy, and we remain confident in the $1 billion contribution from segmentation by 2020.

This summer, we added new margin-accretive flying in 15 domestic markets and we've upgauged 5 domestic markets from regionals to mainline.

We're growing faster than any of our major competitors, something that hasn't happened here in a very long time.

We're doing this by adding efficient, margin-accretive flying.

This summer, 75% of our growth is being driven by gauge, with 25% coming from improved fleet utilization.

United has unique network opportunities, and we're capitalizing on them.

Another example of this is our plan to remake several of our hubs, which further improves connectivity in our domestic network.

We'll start with our Houston hub this fall by taking our bank structure from 10 to 8. We expect connectivity in this hub will increase dramatically, with 50% more connection opportunities in the largest bank on the same number of departures per day.

In 2018, we also plan to re-bank our Chicago and Denver hubs.

Re-banking our hubs, upgauging the airline, improving utilization during peak periods and adding catchment flying are all network improvements that our competitors have already achieved.

That's why these are unique opportunities for United.

On revenue management, we continue to optimize our yield management posture.

We'll roll out the first phase of the new Gemini yield management system in late August with a broader rollout in 2018, consistent with our Investor Day plan.

We're off to a great start on making United the best airline in the world.

It's working really well so far, and we're optimistic about our opportunities ahead and our ability to continue to improve absolute and relative margin performance.

We ran the best large airline operation in the nation in the second quarter, and we continue to close the margin gap this quarter, as we've been doing for the past several quarters.

The United team is truly doing an outstanding job.

With that, I'll turn it over to Andrew to review the financial results.

Thanks, Scott.

Yesterday afternoon, we released our second quarter 2017 earnings and our third quarter investor update.

I'll discuss both our results and outlook at a high level, but please refer to those documents for additional detail.

Slide 11 is a summary of our GAAP financials, and Slide 12 shows our non-GAAP results.

Adjusted earnings per share increased 5.4% to $2.75 and we reported pretax income of $1.3 billion, which represented a 13.2% pretax margin excluding special charges.

Turning to Slide 14, nonfuel unit costs increased 3.1% on a year-over-year basis, which is better than our initial forecast of up 4% to 5%, mostly due to improved operational performance, higher ASM growth, sustained cost reduction efforts and the timing of certain expenses.

We expect third quarter CASM ex to be higher year-over-year by 2% to 3%, and our projected full year 2017 CASM ex increase remains unchanged between 2.5% and 3.5%.

Turning to Slide 15, we ended the quarter with $6.6 billion of unrestricted liquidity, which includes our $2 billion untapped revolver.

We are comfortably in excess of our stated liquidity target range of $5 billion to $6 billion.

During the second quarter, we generated $1.6 billion of operating and $314 million of free cash flow.

We also contributed $160 million to our pension plans and continue to forecast a total contribution of $400 million in the full year 2017.

During the quarter, we repurchased $422 million of our shares at an average price of $74, bringing our repurchases in the first half of 2017 to $735 million at an average price of $72 a share.

As of the end of the second quarter, we had approximately $1.1 billion remaining in repurchase authority.

Turning to Slide 16.

Full year 2017 CapEx is now projected to be between $4.6 billion and $4.8 billion, which is $400 million higher at the midpoint than our prior guidance.

The slide provides some details for this increase, which include higher nonaircraft CapEx, more pre-delivery deposits and used aircraft transactions.

Let me give you a little bit of color on each of these categories.

We will invest between $200 million and $300 million more than forecast earlier this year in IT, ground service equipment, facilities and other critical areas of our business.

Technology projects are the biggest area of nonaircraft CapEx, and we are increasing investment in our digital platforms, applications development and strengthening our technology infrastructure.

On the fleet side, there are 2 buckets driving higher CapEx.

First, $50 million more in PDPs represent the net impact from a number of changes to our new aircraft order book.

The deferral of the first 4 A350 aircraft out of 2018 to later periods is accounted for in our new projection.

Please note that today, we will have no further updates to provide about our A350 order.

Second, $150 million is related to the purchase of 21 narrowbody aircraft off-lease.

These include 737NGs, A320 series aircraft and 757s, which have an average age of 21 years.

We expect to reliably operate these aircraft for many years to come.

The acquisition of used aircraft will be difficult to forecast since these transactions will most oftentimes be opportunistic.

We expect this will continue to be an important part of our fleet strategy and will effectively reduce average fleet CapEx.

We continue to expect 2017 to be the high watermark for CapEx and expect 2018 CapEx to be approximately $1 billion lower.

We will provide a more refined 2018 forecast later this year.

Lastly, Slide 17 has a summary of our current guidance, including third quarter's projected fuel price range, using the July 13 curve.

The range provided for capacity, revenue and costs imply a third quarter pretax margin of between 12.5% and 14.5%.

In conclusion, we are pleased with the results in the first half of 2017 and remain confident in our ability to continue to drive earnings improvement.

We are managing the business to maximize margins and are focused on creating long-term value for our shareholders.

With that, I'd like to thank you all for joining the call today and I will now turn it back to Oscar.

Thanks, Andrew.

And again, one just quick last shout out to the energy and enthusiasm of our employees who made such a strong quarter possible.

And so with that, let's turn it back over to Julie, and we'll be happy to take your questions.

Thank you, Oscar.

First, we will take questions from the analyst community, then we will take questions from the media.

(Operator Instructions)

(Operator Instructions) And from Wolfe Research, we have Hunter Keay on the line.

So Scott, you said that Denver is your most profitable hub.

Obviously, it looks like Frontier has announced a pretty big growth push there with -- I think it's called their own natural share, as they say.

I would be curious to have sort of your early takeaways on what that means for you guys there and if you care to talk about how you might deploy Basic Economy as a means to (inaudible).

This is sort of -- the first sort of like production test of that product.

Or maybe just any broad thoughts will be appreciated.

Sure.

Thanks, Hunter.

In the near to medium term, anytime you have capacity growth from anyone, but particularly a low-cost carrier, it's going to lead to some pricing pressure.

Over the longer term, however, I viewed this really having watched the U/LCC growth in the last decade, this is the best news that I've heard in the last 10 years.

I have known -- and look, what they've said is they're going to run a connecting hub-and-spoke network in Denver, the model that they used to have which [led them to] bankruptcy.

But they're pivoting from what has been the most successful model, point-to-point U/LCC strategy around the world, to going back to trying to copy what the network carriers do and run a connecting business model.

And the reason I view that as the best thing that has happened in the last decade is because I have believed for many years that the U/LCC business model can't work when a network carrier decides to compete on price and particularly once we've been able to roll out Basic Economy.

And while I believed that for a long time, this is the first, I guess, public validation that one of the U/LCCs is throwing in the towel on the point-to-point business model and switching to a network model.

And look, that's a lot more complicated.

It's one thing to run a point-to-point network, but when you're trying to run connecting traffic, you got to slow down the aircraft utilization because you've got to wait for passengers and employees to connect and airplanes to be timed correctly.

You've got to staff up because you have peaks and valleys.

You've got to connect bags, which is one of the most operationally difficult things we do.

Today, if Frontier has a flight from Orlando to Denver and it's delayed by 2 hours, all they have to do is run the flight 2 hours late, but the customer still gets there.

And it's not a good experience, but it's not the end of the world.

Tomorrow, when they have half the people in the airplane that are connecting, if that flight's 2 hours late, their choice -- and they got 1 fight a day to all these markets -- is do we delay everything else for the rest of the day by 2 hours?

Do we have half of the people on that airplane go to a hotel and spend the night?

Or do we buy all or half of the people in that airplane tickets on United to get them to their destination that day?

It is exponentially more complex to run a connecting model.

And for Frontier to publicly acknowledge that the old business model has run out of growth opportunities in the middle of an IPO process, I just view as a phenomenal validation of everything we've done, it has worked; and our ability to compete and win against them.

And I can promise you that they're now competing on our turf and trying to be a network carrier in Denver, that is a battle I guarantee United will win.

All right.

Thank you for that thorough answer, Scott.

I appreciate it.

A question for either you or Andrew, I suppose, on this whole zero-based budgeting concept.

I think there are some success and there are some failure -- stories of failure out there around that concept.

I think like Heinz, for example, is one of the worst places where it didn't work like it was supposed to.

So it's not always a slam dunk.

Can you talk to me about sort of lessons learned that you have seen from your own experience with it?

What maybe you've learned from other industries?

And if it works, does this represent incremental cost upside to what you laid out at the Analyst Day?

Or is that considered as a long-term guide?

Sure.

Yes, Hunter, I think what you're alluding to is the fact that we're going to -- we're starting a -- we're caught in a bottoms-up budgeting process as we get ready to budget 2018.

Look, I view this really simply as a way to understand the business at a greater depth of detail instead of just simply looking at the changes year-over-year in terms of the expenditures.

We need to revisit the expenditures that we spent the year prior and make sure that everything we're spending money on continues to make sense.

So it's a bit of a mind shift and it's a bit of a -- just a change in the way of thinking about the business.

We're not approaching this with any particular cost savings target in mind, but I do believe that in scrutinizing our costs at a higher degree of detail throughout the organization, that we will, in fact, find opportunities to save money along the way.

And -- but this is a journey.

It's going to take time and it's a different way of going through the budgeting process.

So unlike Heinz or some of the other examples, where perhaps the goals were more short-term oriented in removing costs from the business, I think that will just simply be an output over time as we get more proficient at looking at our cost base.

And that process is going to start this fall.

Actually, we've already started that process now.

So.

And Hunter, this is Oscar.

With regards to experience in other industries -- and I've done it in telecom, I've done it in railroads, I've done it in soft drinks.

I just think, as Andrew outlined, this is a normal process that companies go through.

And now that we're running better, we've always talked about taking out some of the safety cushion in operations is one area.

So it this -- we are very cognizant of both the great trust we've built with our employees and with our customers, and we're not going to be silly about the cost structure there.

It's just about making sure we do the normal things that businesses do.

So we're excited about that possibility that Andrew will lead.

From Bank of America, we have Andrew Didora.

Scott, you mentioned, it's in the slide deck and in your prepared remarks, the new summer capacity is efficient and performing well.

Are there any metrics that you can provide to help us understand this?

Because I think the point gets lost a bit, given that the 3Q PRASM and margin guide would suggest otherwise.

Well, I guess I'd start with the back part of that, and I don't think that the 3Q PRASM or margin guide suggests otherwise.

And look, as we've moved from -- what our guide is really reflecting as we move from 2Q to 3Q, one, on a sequential basis, there's a bunch of calendar things that are probably 1 point -- actually, our RM team would say over 1 point of just calendar issues.

That of course is an industry issue, but not having -- or Easter being in the second quarter, the movement of the Jewish holidays in the third quarter, timing of the Easter.

Just even the days of the week, there's extra Friday in the second quarter, extra Saturday in the third quarter, all those things are 1 point.

And then we've also got industry capacity ramping up, particularly in the second half of August and into September at the offpeak period.

And so our guide is really reflecting those things.

We -- our capacity increase has just started.

I'm sure we will come up with some more things to share, but having only been flying for 6 to 7 weeks, it's a little early to have anything definitive to share with you.

But I'm sure we can come up with stuff to talk about more in the future.

But look -- if you even just look at this quarter from a margin perspective, we've only got one airline to compare to.

But at least stripping out the hedge losses, we had, in fact, only about 150 -- another 150 point margin gap closure relative to Delta, the fifth straight quarter that we closed the margin gap.

That's pretty good track record, and we just feel really good about how all this is going.

I'm particularly proud of the ops team because switching from a slow growth or no growth mode to growth is not easy operationally.

And we've done that at the same time our team is putting up absolute records in terms of operational performance.

So really across the board, we're excited about how things have played out so far and very optimistic about the future.

And just my second question.

Andrew, I know, CapEx will be down $1 billion next year, but I think it still implies a tick-up from your prior -- your $3.3 billion to $3.5 billion guide.

Is this just a change in the order book that you've announced over the past few months?

Or is there something else in there to think about in 2018?

No, Andrew, it's really nothing to do with the order book.

It's really more of an -- well, first of all, let me start out by saying that we wanted to give you directionally, rough order of magnitude, a sense of '18 versus '17.

And I think in the comments I made, I did state that we will give you a more refined estimate later this year.

So -- but just rough order of magnitude, I think the main difference is just a higher level of non-aircraft CapEx expenditures.

We think that some of the investments that I've touched on as far as categories of investment that, that will continue next year.

And that's our expectation as we sit here right now.

So it really doesn't tie into the new order book, and I don't expect any changes in the new order book that would affect 2018 CapEx to occur between now and the end of the year.

From UBS, we have Darryl Genovesi.

Scott, does the guidance embed continued strength in operational performance?

Or are you assuming that you normalize to something that you perhaps achieved over, say, a longer period of time versus the second quarter?

I don't know that we've made an explicit assumption either on RASM or CASM about continued operational performance.

It's sort of a continuation of the trends from a RASM perspective, so I guess that would implicitly assume that operations continue to run well, really doing things on a sequential basis.

And from a CASM perspective, I'll let Andrew talk about anything on CASM for better operations.

Yes, I think we've made some assumptions about how meeting certain targets would affect profit-sharing or operational bonuses that are based on meeting certain targets.

We do expect to continue to operate the airline at a similar high level that we've been.

As far as estimating a higher completion factor, we really haven't taken that into account on a go-forward basis.

Okay.

And any rough thoughts towards your 2018 capacity plan at this point?

Not yet.

Okay.

I mean, have you filled out all of the catchment area flying, the stuff that you weren't already serving that you've added this year?

Would you say that process is largely complete?

No, but you shouldn't try to read anything into that about 2018 capacity.

So no, we haven't completed that process.

From Deutsche Bank, we have Mike Linenberg.

I just have a couple of fleet questions here.

The 4 A350s, does that represent 100% of your A350 deliveries in '18?

Yes, it does, Mike.

Okay, great.

And then just the MAX -- the dozen MAX aircraft that are being accelerated into 2019, are those MAX 8s?

And then if they are, are those types of airplanes in a 2 class or 2-plus class?

Would those airplanes make sense trans-Atlantic for you?

Mike, let me handle the first part and then maybe Andrew or Scott can talk about the network use of that.

First of all, they're MAX 9 aircraft.

So they're not 8s.

Not to say we might one day not -- we might one day order 8s, but those are MAX 9 aircraft.

And those 12 aircraft, as you recall, we deferred 65 -- well, we deferred 61 737-700 airplanes.

That was about a year ago that we did that, a little less than a year ago.

4 of the 65 became 800s, 737-800s, which are delivering this year.

And the balance of the 61 positions has been kind of put out there in the future in different -- way out in the future with Boeing, and what we're doing here is that these 12 aircraft are kind of the first 12 of those 61 that we've identified a delivery slot and they're coming in, in 2019 as we indicated in the release.

So as far as the suitability of the MAX 8 for trans-Atlantic, I think Andrew's probably going to take that one on.

Yes.

I think right now, Mike, we have plenty of 757s in our European configuration that are flying around in the domestic system.

So I don't think we have any rush to move into flying 737s across the Atlantic.

But it's something we're going to look at for the medium to long term, but it's not something that we plan to do in the short term at all.

From Cowen and Company, we have Helane Becker.

I just have a couple of questions.

One, I think one of the things that you're doing to improve consumer relations has to do -- and denied boardings, and I think, Oscar, you may have mentioned this as well -- with a program to encourage passengers to change their flights a few days in advance.

And I'm kind of wondering how that's going, the acceptance of that, whether that's driving more -- knowing that they won't be bumped, driving more passengers your way?

Helane, this is Andrew Nocella.

We're working on a pilot that does what you described.

We have not implemented it as of yet.

And I would say it's a pilot, so it's really small.

This is something that we continue to evaluate.

We think it's a great idea for our customers and for United Airlines.

So more to come on this as it becomes something substantial.

But at this point, we'll likely launch the pilot in the next few weeks.

And the total number of passengers being moved in this pilot, if they so desire to move, will probably be in the neighborhood of 50.

So it's really small scale.

But we think it's a great idea.

And if it works and our customers appreciate it, a lot more to come.

Okay, great.

So we'll look out for that.

And then, I just have a question on CapEx and IT spend.

Airlines were really early adopters of technology and haven't been able to keep pace, in part, because obviously there were financial issues in the last decade.

But I'm kind of wondering, as you think about IT spend over the next 3 or 4 years, can you just -- of your CapEx budget, should we think about that as being like 10% of the budget?

Should we think about it as being a combination of new website, new -- reach out to -- customer outreach in terms of the mobile app and so on as well as system redundancy so that you don't get caught out with technology issues?

Sure, Helane.

Our technology spend both this year and going forward, I think, will be all of the above, everything you mentioned.

It's application development, both customer facing as well as operationally, beneficial applications.

It's infrastructure investments, including disaster recovery.

That's a big part of our spend this year.

It is bringing in automation in parts of the business where we've had very little of that including, for instance, in our warehouses.

We have a project this year we launched where we're going to start to automate our warehouses in terms of our spare parts inventory.

And there -- I think you're right, there is a big opportunity to bring technology into the business and allow us to increase our efficiency as a result of taking advantage of that opportunity.

And I think you're also right that through many, many years, we didn't have the balance sheet or the wherewithal to be able to make these types of investments.

And we're fortunate to be in a position where we can change that, and that's what we're doing.

And that is, in large measure, why we're spending more money this year on non-aircraft CapEx projects.

As far as the pace of spend, I would assume it'll probably be -- probably about 1/3 of aircraft; or non-aircraft CapEx will be in the IT arena as far as capital expenditures, obviously, more related to the OpEx line.

From Citi, we have Kevin Crissey.

Maybe, Scott, could you talk about corporate, whether it be share or performance, relative to leisure, in general?

Corporate was strong in this quarter, with growth that was -- it was up 6%, our corporate business.

That's not the best metric, I mean, I'd give it to you, but we can always make corporate go up by just signing more corporate accounts.

But we also think the quality of our corporate accounts was good, but business demand is, I think, certainly internationally, stronger than leisure demand.

But corporate demand was strong throughout the quarter.

From Raymond James, we have Savi Syth.

Scott, maybe I can ask you just how should we think about when you start to see the benefits to PRASM from 3 items, like: one is the kind of the increased smaller market presence; the second one is just Basic Economy, which you just rolled out; and then eventually, this Gemini rollout in late August.

Like when should we think of that showing up in unit revenue where maybe your unit revenue doesn't perform in line with what you would expect given comps or capacity?

So I'll make one overarching point, that our initiative -- the initiatives you talked about, some of those are -- like, Gemini is RASM specific, but many of those are about margin and you're already seeing that.

You saw it in the second quarter, you're going to continue to see it going forward.

And I think some of those are showing up in PRASM performance.

I mean, you look at our second quarter, and maybe take domestic, we've only got one competitor to compare to.

But given our growth rate and given some of the issues that happened at Delta last year, to be that close, I think we feel really good about the result already.

On those things, new markets was the first one you mentioned, those aren't, on day one, PRASM-accretive.

You start flying to a new city, it takes some time to ramp up.

We typically think of that as about -- on a domestic city, a 6- to 12-month ramp-up before you kind of get the full benefit.

Gemini, the new yield management system.

We've already had some yield management benefits but they're not really the system.

I think they really just started in the first quarter of this year.

On the system, we're going to roll out the first part of the new system in -- at the end of August, but I wouldn't expect meaningful changes to revenue for a little while.

And even when we do roll that out to the full system, those kinds of changes -- yield management systems are the kind of changes that sometimes, you take 1 step back to take 2 steps forward because you turn off an old system that has 15 years of human intelligence built into it.

It's not always -- actually, it's rarely a straight-line improvement.

You got to get the system to -- and it will take some time to do that.

That process is going to start in August.

And then Basic Economy, we've got Basic Economy rolled out across the system, but we've been [through] the last couple of months.

One of our big competitors essentially hasn't rolled it out.

They've got it in less than 1% of their system.

And there's a bunch of places that we've been uncompetitive from a pricing perspective.

We haven't been -- normally, we worry a lot about pricing competitiveness in the near term.

We've been willing to be uncompetitive on price in the short term as we try to get this sorted out for what it's going to look like for the next 20 years, instead of worrying about the next 2 months.

But I think by the end of the year, we'll have a position where everyone, all the big network carriers, presumably will have rolled out Basic Economy around their whole system.

And at that limit -- at that point, I think Basic Economy will be more of a tailwind.

It's less of a tailwind right now because on some of our competitors, the standard -- you can get the standard product on our competitors for the same price that you can get the Basic Economy product on United Airlines.

That won't be the case in the long run.

But in the near term, we get benefits from selling up more customers, but I'm sure we'll lose some share as a result of that as well.

That's helpful.

And if I may, just really quick.

I wonder if there's an update on, earlier this year, there was an announcement about kind of investing in Avianca and Avianca Brasil and kind of deepening the partnerships there.

Is there any kind of progress on the investment?

Or any kind of strategic initiatives related to that?

There is lots of progress, but none of which we can talk about on the call today.

We are continuing to work with partners, and we appreciate all of our Latin American partnerships.

And we hope to be able to have something to announce in the not-too-distant future.

From Morgan Stanley, we have Rajeev Lalwani.

Oscar, actually, a question for you, a higher-level one.

There've been quite a few developments since your Investor Day last year.

Can you just talk about some of the pluses and minuses since then that make it easier or harder for you to narrow the margin gap and meet some of the other commitments?

I'll give it a shot.

We, on the plus side, feel like we're executing really well on all the initiatives that we talked about.

We've done more work in yield management than we initially intended.

We've grown more confident on Basic Economy, particularly when it's rolled out everywhere.

We -- the network stuff is a little -- some of the re-banking is a little delayed as we've got through the operational, making sure we can handle it operationally.

Also on the plus side, the operation is running better than it ever has in history.

And I said earlier on, it's the thing we're probably the most proud of that really is a great foundation to build on the rest of the airline.

In the nearer term -- so most of the things are going on plan or a little bit better than plan.

In the nearer term, there's been a headwind.

Geography is a headwind for us.

That has nothing to do with margin gap closure.

But for example, in the second quarter, if we just had applied our RASM performance to the Delta geography that's a little (inaudible) right now, our RASM would have been 0.7 points better.

I mean, that really is we have big exposure to China and less exposure to domestic.

So when China is doing worse and domestic is doing better, we're going to underperform on the system PRASM level, not because we're underperforming but just because we have bad geography.

Those things ebb and flow, so we don't really think of those as margin gap one way or another.

Because in one quarter, that hurts you and in another quarter, it helps you.

In the short term, it's hurting us.

So really, I think mostly throughout the quarter, we feel pretty good about the trajectory that we're on.

And then actually, Scott, on the international front, as we move beyond the next quarter or 2, and I think you're kind of alluding to this, where do you think the best opportunity is?

And how sustainable is some of the flattish PRASM we've seen, just given how much we've already improved over the last year or 2?

Well, for United, we have more modest growth plans internationally.

Our international network is fantastic.

We have the best international network in the business.

I think we have the most -- the highest profit margins in the business.

Latin America is obviously recovering quickly.

We've added some capacity there.

We're going to start Newark to Buenos Aires service.

We've added a little bit in Europe.

Obviously, Asia is the most challenged.

I suspect we'll continue to grow, but not grow quickly on the international line.

And our growth will kind of depend on what's happening geography-by-geography.

So it's hard to predict this far in advance what Asia is going to be doing 2 years from now versus what South America's going to be doing 2 years from now.

But I would anticipate modest growth, but at a much lower rate than the domestic growth.

From Stifel, we have Joe DeNardi.

Scott, just given the partnership you guys have with Chase, I'm wondering if you could just talk to what you guys are seeing in terms of an impact from their rollout of Sapphire Reserve card, what that's meant for your business in terms of spend and card acquisitions?

And maybe what you're doing to make sure that the value your card offers consumers remains competitive?

Look, we're having an awful lot of discussions with Chase, and we appreciate the partnership with Chase.

We've gotten more engaged at a high level.

So I have now a quarterly meeting with Gordon.

He runs the card portfolio at Chase.

And I believe that this should be upside in the future for us.

It is one of the areas where we are currently underperforming.

Both Delta and American is probably a full margin point, if not 1.5 point, the kind of performance that they're getting.

This is about partnership and about making -- getting to a world that's a win for Chase and a win for United Airlines.

We have done that before.

We're fortunate to have the man sitting next to me, Andrew Nocella, who led those efforts at my last airlines.

And American's got a huge tailwind right now from the deal with Citi and they have a great partnership with them.

I believe we're going to get -- it didn't happen overnight, and I believe we're going to get there and I believe that Chase is committed to that and that we're getting to get to a win-win with them.

But I'm not sure when we're going to be able to have the kinds of tailwinds that American and Delta have had, but I'm optimistic that we will get there.

[It is a thing] that we have to spend a lot of time talking about because we can't do it alone, but I think the motivation is in the right place with our partners and that we will ultimately get a much better result out of the card, which will be good for United, good for Chase and good for our customers.

That's great.

And then maybe just switching gears a little bit.

I think there have been a number of things that have kind of improved the cyclicality of the business, but maybe one thing working against it is this -- what seems to be a shift towards more corporate traffic away from leisure.

I'm just wondering, Scott or Andrew, if you could talk about, historically, how -- what the share of corporate traffic now is versus 10 years ago, and what that means for cyclicality.

I don't think it's dramatically different.

It gets focused on these earnings calls more than anywhere else.

I don't think it's dramatically different.

If you look at -- there's places where it's important, like across the Atlantic, but then you've got leisure markets like Hawaii that are gangbusters, and so there's puts and takes.

And the only thing I'll add is I think we're seeing strong premium performance across the globe other than Asia at this point, and it's nice to see.

And I think part of that is corporate.

From JPMorgan, we have Jamie Baker.

Well, nice segue from Chase.

First question for -- that wasn't deliberate, was it?

(inaudible)

First question -- I know what's in my wallet.

First question for Andrew, look, the third quarter guide, I mean it's being met with disappointment by the market.

My assumption is that if we set fuel to the side, your 2017 earnings plan is coming in a bit below what the '17 plan was last November.

My first question is whether or not that is the case.

But more importantly, assuming that things are coming in a bit below plan, can you point to what adjustments that you've made in order to potentially get back on track, maybe 2, 3, 4 initiatives that are incremental?

Well, Jamie, I guess we'll start by maybe just that we don't agree with that view.

We -- I don't think any of us feel that we're off-track in 2017 at all, even if you exclude the fact that fuel is, indeed, lower than what we thought it would be at the beginning of the year.

I think the biggest difference we've seen on the revenue side is what's been discussed already, which is weakness in the Pacific, China, Hong Kong specifically.

That definitely was not expected.

That's the only thing so far that we've seen that is a surprise on the cost side.

Everything is progressing as expected.

So no, I think we're kind of hitting on all cylinders and doing everything we thought we'd do.

Okay.

A question for Scott, and I guess this builds a little bit on the theme of Savi's question, but I'm curious what the Basic Economy RASM contribution is as it relates to the third quarter guide for flat domestic RASM?

We were assured the Basic Economy was going to be immediately accretive, at least, I think that's what you said.

So I'm wondering, if that has proven to be the case, it would suggest that absent Basic Economy, your domestic RASM would actually be going down.

And I'm not sure that I understand why that would be.

So on Basic Economy, I do expect it will be RASM accretive and immediately RASM accretive when it's a competitive product.

And I don't recall if we said that exactly in the past, but that would've been the underlying assumption that it was going to be competitive, and we expected our competitors to get the full rollout.

[Of course], they've taken longer.

I still think they're going to get there.

But in the near term, the upside that we get from upsell is offset -- it's impossible for us to measure accurately, but I'm sure it's offset to a large or maybe a complete degree by share shift.

And so it would (inaudible) forecast is probably what our competitors are going to do.

We don't know that.

We can't control that.

And we'll have to -- we'll get bigger benefits once we roll it out everywhere.

From Barclays, we have Brandon Oglenski.

Thanks for taking my question, and sorry if it comes off as critical, but we're trying to be constructive here.

So I guess, we might disagree because you guys have been talking about a lot of margin-accretive capacity additions, economy basic (sic) [Basic Economy] rollout, yield management, yet margins sequentially are looking about flat.

Your competitors are up a little bit.

So when we think about those initiatives you guys laid out back in November with $1.8 billion of incremental earnings expected this year, how can investors start to measure when that's actually going to gain traction, when you guys can really start showing some improvement on the profitability of the business?

Look, I think we are -- 5 quarters in a row of closing the margin gap.

You're forward-looking -- I guess you're -- I'm going to assume you're comparing to one airline which has given guidance for the third quarter, which is Delta.

And we knew and could have known and everyone could have known all along that the third quarter was likely to be a year-over-year headwind.

I mean, Delta had its self-described 2-point hit to RASM in last year's third quarter from IT, their IT meltdown and related other issues.

And then there was also a pricing issue at Delta last year, which I don't know for sure what the number was, I would guess it was another half of -- 50 basis points.

And so those things are uniquely third quarter year-over-year comp issues that are nothing about the trend line, nothing about margin gap closure.

We've had 5 straight quarters of closing the margin gap, and we feel really good about that.

That's the metric you should look at us on.

It's not going to be every quarter.

Sometimes, there's going to be quarter-over-quarter things that happened either this year or last year.

Sometimes, there's going to be geographical changes.

China goes gangbusters all of a sudden, we'll outperform more.

If China's bad, that kind of widens the gap.

Those are core to the kinds of initiatives we talked about at Investor Day, so we feel really good about what's happened in the last year and the trajectory going forward.

Okay.

I appreciate that, Scott, but I mean you guys have these initiatives ramping to $3.2 billion of incremental earnings improvement.

I mean, how do we think about those numbers relative to your earnings that are down year-on-year?

And I get it, those were not net of cost inflation and some labor deals.

But your investors are looking for that earnings improvement.

When should we expect that?

And I guess, just coming back to the earlier question, what are some things that could change in the future if that traction doesn't develop?

Well, I mean, I think it's kind of -- I guess to answer the question, when we say $3.2 billion of earnings improvement, we've been saying compared to what it would've been without the initiatives.

That's not -- I never said $3.2 billion compared to whatever that baseline was, 2015 or anything else.

And so things like fuel price changes, things like new labor deals, things like industry revenue conditions change that baseline.

It really is about being on a trajectory to close relative margin gap.

As much as anything, it's probably the best way to measure those things.

And absolute margin gap, and we've been doing that and we expect to continue doing that going forward.

That's the best way to measure it, though.

From Evercore ISI, we have Duane Pfennigwerth.

Can you talk about the linkage, if there is any, between planned growth at United and margin expansion for the company?

Not anything relative, but just getting your margins back to a trajectory of up year-over-year?

I mean, obviously, growth makes unit costs look a little bit better, makes employees happy, but what is the point of growing faster than GDP, faster than your peers while your margins are still declining?

Well, look, I sound like a broken record, but we continue to close the margin gap each quarter.

We did this quarter as well.

And yes, we had big pay increases for our people year-over-year, something we're really proud of, really happy, something that they deserve.

That is -- that was the right thing to do.

And implicit in your question is somehow growth -- I don't know, if the growth was going to either overcome that and if growth wasn't going to overcome that, you shouldn't have grown.

We were more profitable.

We had a higher margin this quarter than we would've absent growth.

And that's the right metric.

So we feel really good about where we are.

I'm not sure what's going to happen with the macro environment from a revenue perspective or from a fuel price perspective.

We do know that the big pay increases, which were great, are in the past.

And so we're starting to overlap those things.

But we're still going to be subject to what happens from exogenous macroeconomic stuff.

And our last question from Stephens, we have Jack Atkins.

So I guess, looking forward for a moment, Scott, in reference to your comment around comps getting more challenging in the back half of the year, and certainly some of the internal revenue initiatives that I think may take a little bit longer to gain traction than initially expected.

But given the state of the overall market, would you expect you guys to be able to see positive unit revenues in the fourth quarter, given that comps are materially more difficult in the 4Q versus the 3Q?

Or is really the weakness in Asia and the difficult comparisons going to make that more difficult to see, unless we see a step-up in industry fundamentals?

Yes.

So look, we don't have any real data for the fourth quarter, so our forecast can really be no better than yours.

I can tell you some puts and takes.

You're right, comps get more difficult.

But at the same time, there's 1 point calendar headwind, at least -- I don't actually know for sure what the Christmas and New Year's holidays are, but at least the Jewish holidays are a tailwind for the fourth quarter.

So the calendar does get better for the fourth quarter.

And we also know that Southwest growth -- and Southwest is the largest domestic carrier, Southwest growth is going to be a lot slower in the fourth quarter as they retire all their Classics.

So those are 2 things that are tailwinds, and the only thing that I can really think of as an incremental, I don't know if I can call it a headwind, but the comps do get more difficult.

So your guess is as good as mine on how those -- combination of things balance out.

Okay.

And just for a follow-up and kind of going back to the earlier statements around natural share, when you think about sort of the long-term capacity growth plans, I guess just conceptually, how do you guys weigh the desire to take back what you view as your natural market share versus the potential for market disruption that, that could cause?

I mean, clearly you need to do what's in the best interest of your company and what you believe to be in the best interest of the company.

But in cases where share has been ceded over the years and it could be highly disruptive to getting that back, how do you balance that internally?

Look, growing a hub-and-spoke network is different than point-to-point.

And the kind of growth we're doing, and hasn't been highly disruptive.

I don't think it will be highly disruptive.

We're not going in and trying to start flying from Miami to Milwaukee and compete head-to-head with someone.

We're growing in our hubs, where we can have the majority of people on the airplane are connecting traffic and connecting revenues.

And in a few places, we're going back to having just competitive service in a market like Newark to Atlanta, where our competitor, Delta, flies mainline and we have downgraded to regional jets.

And now we're back to mainline.

I don't view those things as disruptive.

They haven't been disruptive, and I don't expect them to be.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

This concludes the analyst and investor portion of our call today.

We will now take questions from the media.

(Operator Instructions) .

From The Street, we have Ted Reed.

I'd like to ask about the Pacific, Scott.

Delta just announced moving to Atlanta, Shanghai and I just wonder how the downsizing in Narita affects you overall in Asia.

I don't know.

I had read that announcement.

I wasn't sure whether we're getting the slot, although we had speculated it was Narita, Shanghai.

I guess you're confirming that.

I don't think I have anything -- I mean, I just read it before I came in here, so I don't really have anything to say about it.

Okay.

But in general, as Narita becomes less important, does that impact you in Asia and in China?

Well, I think we have a great operation in Narita.

This is Andrew, Ted.

I think that we have a great operation in Narita.

We have a great partner with ANA.

And I think I'm really optimistic about Japan over the long run.

Right now, the Pacific over the short run is a trouble spot in terms of RASM, as we've said over and over again.

So we are going to be really careful, particularly in Shanghai and Beijing over the next 12 months in terms of our capacity deployment to make sure we can move those markets in the right trajectory for a positive RASM outlook.

But we're really confident in where we are in the Pacific, our partners and our hubs, and we think we have these [things] franchised.

From you Houston Chronicle, we have Andrea Rumbaugh.

United reported a strong financial and operational quarter, but this can get overshadowed by some of the incidents that have gone viral in social media.

And so I just want to know how you guys are working to showcase the airline's improvement in the era of social media right now.

Andrea, this is Oscar.

I think it's a continuing task.

The advent of social media in our space is particularly notable.

And I think the best thing that we can do and continue to do is to refine our customer service experience models, training and people, and move from there.

I think you'll see something from us in the next quarter or so as we revamp our social media team about how we respond.

And just we need to be a little bit more agile.

We're a big, large company and sometimes we are stuck in the past, and I think we need to evolve forward so that we can handle those events fairly quickly.

Not just from a management of the media and its imprint, but of the individuals involved and if we can fix the issues.

So I think it's an important distinction between just managing or spinning an issue versus actually preventing it and solving for it.

And from Flightglobal, we have Edward Russell.

I was wondering if you could break down your deliveries for 2018, I'm -- I count 19 aircraft.

Could you confirm that?

And when will you take your first MAX and your first 787-10?

Let's see, the first 787-10, I believe, is 2019.

Okay, it's 2019.

At the end of '18, so it'll be in service in 2019.

The first MAX is 2020 -- well, the first MAX 10 is 2020, I'm not sure if you're asking about MAX 10 or just MAX in general.

Just first MAX in general.

Yes, next year, 2018 is first MAX in general.

As far as the number of deliveries next year, I'm looking at Gerry Laderman here to keep me honest.

We may have to just get back to you with an actual number there.

Thank you.

We'll now turn it back to our speakers for concluding remarks.

Thank you all for joining the call today.

Please contact investor or media relations if you have any further questions, and we look forward to talking to you next quarter.

Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference.

Thank you for joining.

You may now disconnect.