SAS Group dives on the Stockholm stock exchange after the company released worse-than-expected traffic figures.

“Traffic growth and capacity factor are both below my expectations”, said Jacob Pedersen, aviation analyst at Danish Sydbank, to The Swedish Wire.

By Friday afternoon, the SAS stock was down almost 6 percent on Nasdaq OMX Stockholm. Since the turn of the year the SAS share is down 39 percent.

In May SAS Group's traffic decreased by 18.1 percent and seat capacity was down 16.7 percent compared to the same month 2008. The numbers of passengers fell 17.1 percent to 2.2 million.

The yield for Scandinavian Airlines in April, the most recent month for which data is available, was down by 11.7 percent, which is lower than expected. Also for May, the change in yield is likely to be negative compared to last year.

“The underlying yield has now turned negative, and this put even more pressure on SAS' earnings. Clearly a negative”, Jacob Pedersen said.

At the same time, the loss-making aviation company said that restructuring costs would increase substantially due to an earlier phase-out of aircraft.

“All in all disappointing figures, and SAS will now likely enhances their restructuring-measures in august when they release their half year report”, said Jacob Pedersen.