Carnival Reports Record Full Year, Fourth Quarter Earnings

(Source: Travel Pulse)

The Carnival Corporation reported record fourth quarter and full-year earnings Tuesday, in a call that also allowed CEO Arnold Donald to assure investment analysts that the recent terror attack in Berlin would have no impact on the cruise line's earnings, saying there was "no reason" for elevated concern.

According to the Associated Press, the Miami-based company exceeded expectations on Wall Street, reporting a fourth-quarter profit of $609 million, compared to $270 million for the same period last year.

Meanwhile, the company's profit for the full year came in at $2.8 billion, up significantly from $1.8 billion the previous year.

"We achieved the most profitable year in our company's history as well as record fourth quarter earnings," said Carnival Corporation & plc president and CEO Arnold Donald said in a statement. "The continued execution of our core strategy to drive consumer demand in excess of measured capacity growth, contain costs and leverage our industry-leading scale resulted in our third consecutive year of significantly higher earnings and return on invested capital."

"This continued strong performance is a credit to the outstanding contributions of our 120,000 employees worldwide who work every day to exceed our guests' expectations and our thousands of travel agent partners around the globe whose support is crucial to our success."

Looking ahead to the new year, Carnival has expressed optimism, pointing out that "cumulative advance bookings for the first three quarters of 2017 are well ahead of the prior year at considerably higher prices."

"We enjoyed strong momentum in booking patterns throughout 2016 and therefore are in a stronger booked position entering the new year at higher prices as a result of our ongoing efforts to increase consideration and demand for our brands," added Donald, who cited the impact of fuel and currency as the company's biggest challenges in 2017.

For the current quarter set to end in March 2017, Carnival anticipates adjusted earnings per share in the range of $0.31 to $0.35.

Overall, the fourth quarter was a memorable one for Carnival, which saw Carnival Cruise Line's Carnival Vista make its U.S. debut and Holland America Line's Koningsdam make its North American debut.