flyExclusive (AMEX:FLYX) held its fourth-quarter earnings conference call on Thursday. Below is the complete transcript from the call.
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Full Transcript
OPERATOR
Greetings and welcome to the flyExclusive fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in your listen only mode. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. If anyone should require operator assistance, please press Star zero on your telephone keypad. It’s now my pleasure to turn the call over to C.J. Neal, Investor Relations. Please go ahead sir. Thank you operator.
C.J. Neal
Good afternoon and thank you for joining flyExclusive’s fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings conference call. Joining me on the call today is Jim Seagrave, flyExclusive’s Founder and Chief Executive Officer and Brad Garner, our Chief Financial Officer. We announced fourth quarter and year end financial results this morning before the market opened along with the filing of our Form 10-K for the year end December 31, 2025. We’ll be providing certain non-GAAP information during today’s discussion. Important disclosures about this information and reconciliation of the non-GAAP information to comparable GAAP information is included in our Form 10-K filed with the SEC and is available on our investor relations website. In addition, this discussion might include forward looking statements. Actual results might differ materially from any number of reasons including risk factors described in our annual report on Form 10-K and our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and in the press release covering forward looking statements. Rather than rereading this information, we are going to incorporate it by reference in our prepared remarks. And with that let me turn the
Jim Seagrave
call over to Jim Seagrave. Thank you. Good morning and thank you for joining us. 2025 was a turning point for flyExclusive. Over the last two years we made deliberate decisions to transform this company, modernizing the fleet, eliminating non performing aircraft, restructuring costs and raising our execution standards across the organization. Those decisions were not always easy, but in the fourth quarter the results validated the strategy. We delivered 105 million in fourth quarter revenue up 15% year over year. We generated $6.8 million of positive adjusted EBITDA, our first positive quarter since becoming a public company. That milestone matters, but what matters more is how we achieved it. We didn’t grow the fleet to get there, we improved the fleet and we executed at a higher level across the board. Let me walk through what changed. Last year we removed 28 non performing aircraft. We added seven highly profitable aircraft. Overall we flew 13% more flight hours while operating 14% fewer aircraft. Our revenue was up 15% to 376 million for the year. Our gross profit was up 53%. In 2025 we flew over 74,000 flight hours including over 20,000 in the fourth quarter. We are now the number one charter operator in the United States and the overall number three operator. When including fractional turboprop and management operators, core fleet utilization increased approximately 23% per aircraft to an average of 73 hours per plane over the full year. And we achieved this performance in the face of all the non performing aircraft we have been eliminating. Dispatch availability improved roughly 7% year over year. And let me remind you that every 1% improvement at our current size translates to 2.5 million per year on our bottom line. To drive this Initiative, we put 12 mobile service unit maintenance trucks in place late in 2025 and expect to double this fleet over the next six months. Adjusted EBITDA margin improved nearly 1500 basis points. This is not a seasonal or cyclical improvement. This is structural improvement. We removed drag from the system and the system responded. SG&A as a percentage of revenue declined approximately 10% generating more than $8 million in annualized savings. Revenue per SGA employee increased approximately 28% generating 1.9 million per person and revenue per employee overall increased 15% to $800,000 per person. Contractually committed demand hours from our fractional club and partner programs increased approximately 33% again all on a size A fleet size 14%. Smaller operating losses from the non performing aircraft fleet declined from more than 3 million per month at the beginning of 2024 to approximately break even today. The reset is largely complete, but we are far from done. Now we scale from strength before moving forward. I want to recognize our team. We ask this organization to execute with discipline, focus and a willingness to change. They delivered. They didn’t just improve results, they changed the trajectory of this company. Every department executed from accounting to flight control, maintenance control technicians, pilots, sales services and the management teams. The fourth quarter was an example of what great teamwork across the board looks like. I’m incredibly proud of what we have accomplished. I also want to thank our investors for their continued support and trust. We are all focused on delivering results for you and our customers looking forward. While not providing formal long term guidance. I want to be clear about our trajectory and future direction. First quarter 2026 will soundly exceed first quarter 2025, but it will not exceed our fourth quarter 2025 results as the fourth quarter is always our strongest quarter and we executed exceptionally well. But as we look forward quarter by quarter, we expect every quarter of 2026 to meaningfully outperform the corresponding quarter of 2025. And to put a little historical context on this, over the last eight quarters we have improved our profitability every quarter by an average of $3.7 million per quarter. That is the trajectory we are on. We are continuing to execute and with the drag of the non performing fleet behind us, fully expect to grow the number of aircraft flight hours and improve every financial performance metric in 2026, just like we did in 2025. Let me ground these expectations in some numbers. In the first quarter of 2025, adjusted EBITDA was a negative 12.5 million and management adjusted EBITDA was a negative 6.4 million. Today, more than 2/3 of the way through the first quarter of 2026, we believe it’s appropriate to provide some directional commentary. Based on the current performance trend. We expect to reduce our first quarter 2026 loss by approximately 50% compared to the first quarter of 2025, continuing the positive trajectory we have been delivering over the last two years. This improvement reflects structural change. Improved fleet economics, higher utilization, lower SGA and stronger demand from every revenue channel. We expect to improve our dispatch reliability another 10% in 2026, which will translate to another 25 million in annualized bottom line performance improvement. We expect to increase our revenue per SGA employee more than 15% to well more than 2 million per employee in 20. This is not formal guidance, it’s simply transparency around our trajectory and our momentum. And the momentum is clearly moving in the right direction. With the fleet reset largely complete, we are focused on disciplined growth. The government shut down late last year that delayed our plan to reach 10 Challenger aircraft by year end 2025. But …
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