Profits at Ethiopian Airlines dipped 19 percent to $232 million in the last financial year on unaudited revenues of $2.71 billion, as cargo reached almost 340,000 tons, Ethiopian Airlines Group CEO Tewolde Gebremariam told AIN on the sidelines of the Airline Economics Growth Frontiers Dubai 2017 conference last month.

“Some six billion people live within a ten-hour flight radius of Addis Ababa,” he said. Ethiopian has more than 100 international destinations, including 39 freighter and 19 domestic routes.

The airline has 92 aircraft in service, with 62 on order. This includes 19 Boeing 787-8s in service and four on order, nine 737-700NGs in total with partner airlines and 16 737-800s in the fleet, with a further 30 737 Max 8s on order. It also operates five Airbus A350-900s, and has a total of 19 A350s on order.

With hubs in Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, Lomé in Togo and Lilongwe in Malawi, Ethiopian increasingly considers itself a carrier for all of Africa. Last year, affiliate ASKY launched flights from Lomé to Newark (New Jersey in the U.S.) and São Paolo, Brazil, while Ethiopian also eyes the lucrative Brazil-China route, using Addis Ababa as a hub to spur inter-BRICS development.

Gebremariam said an airline business is one of the most difficult to run in the world. Airlines are surrounded by monopolistic suppliers, but at the demand end of the value chain they are dominated by almost perfect competition driven by excess capacity in the market. “It is a paradox manifested by exponentially rising costs to produce the product," he said, "but continuously declining price of air travel to the customer.”