While they did not provide a range, analysts expect the airline to see a quarter-on-quarter improvement in its passenger load and yield - the average revenue earned for each kilometre flown per passenger.
"Excluding EI (extraordinary items), MAS could see a small normalised profit," said an analyst with a local research firm.
The second quarter has traditionally been MAS' weakest quarter and the airline tends to do better in the second half of the year.
MAS managing director and chief executive officer Tengku Datuk Azmil Zahruddin in a recent interview with Business Times said the second quarter was traditionally its weakest quarter.
"We can't comment on quarter two (results) but it is historically our weakest quarter. We have many years where we have made money for the year but lost money for quarter two," Tengku Azmil said.
Regional carriers that have released their earnings for the three months ended June 30 2010 saw better yields and load factors as air travel slowly recovers from the global economic downturn that first began to impact the airline industry in the second half of 2008.
Singapore Airlines said it had reversed losses from a year ago to post an operating profit of S$136 million (RM316.9 million) for the three month period ended June 30.
It carried 4 million passengers in the quarter, a 5.5 per cent increase from one year ago while revenue passenger-kilometre was up 8.8 per cent.
MAS' second quarter results, to be released today, should see a strong improvement from the operational losses of RM420.8 million made in the same corresponding quarter a year ago.
It posted operational losses for the first three quarters of last year but finally made an operating profit of RM3.8 million in the final quarter ended December 31 2009 due to the peak season for air travel.
The airline also posted an operating profit of RM289.5 million for its first quarter ended March 31 but this was mainly due to a compensation it received from Airbus.
The second quarter results will take into account MAS' losses made from air traffic disruption in Europe as a result of the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud in April.
Its loss of RM15 million from the first ash cloud disruption includes aircraft holding cost at airports, hotels, loss of sales and clearing the backlog of passengers.
"That is just an estimate of the direct impact. What we can't estimate is people who wanted to travel but then changed their minds. They may have wanted to book but never did and never flew, so that is more difficult to quantify," said Tengku Azmil.
An analyst said that he did not expect the losses to be significant, as experienced by European airlines.
He added that MAS' results briefing will give further clarity over the airline's outlook for the second half of the year, in terms of forward bookings.
The airline has targeted an operating profit of between RM100-RM325 million for its full fiscal year ending December 31 2010 and will focus its growth on Asia.
"The growth out of Europe and US has been small. Asia is where the growth is so it makes more sense to put in more capacity in Asia.
"Asia Pacific has already surpassed Europe and US as the single biggest region. Some projections are saying that in 10 years, the growth in the Asia Pacific market will be bigger than the total market (growth) today," said Tengku Azmil.
By Jeeva Arulampalam
Business Times
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