Norwegian continues massaging its numbers

Latest they accounted as income nearly 500 million nkr worth of unused and expired bonus points they had booked as expenses when customers earned them before the pandemic and before old Norwegian went bust.

This comes in addition to the couple of billion nkr of future discounts Boeing gave them as repatriation for earlier problems old Norwegian had with the Boeing planes. New Norwegian also booked this in as income for 2022.

In quarter 4 with twice as much income as the year before they managed to only loose about the same as the year before. Is that good, bad, nah or neither. It does point to that they still have problem with growing in a profitable way.

Then we come to the the 7,8 billion nkr they say they have in cash. How much of this is unearned payments from future customers. The current CEO Karlsen used to count that as cash when he was just chief of finance in old Norwegian. That went bad in 2020 when they couldn't fly those customers, they all wanted refunds and no new money came in. 

At the same time Norwegian is hovering up more planes where they can find them. They took on leases for 6 relatively new 737-ExMax that was earlier at Flyr. Supposedly to keep the planned expansion rolling even though ordered planes directly from Boeing are delayed.

They appear hopeful that the only other large competitor within Scandinavia SAS will survive. Probably because they know SAS is easier to compete against than an expected rapid expansion from Wizz and Ryanair if SAS goes under. 

Will this  be another Norwegian on mud feet. The prediction is Norwegian will have a problem if another shock hits the airline business. And they do tend to come regularly.