Wall Street analysts have identified an unexpected winner of the diet boom: airlines! Because lighter passengers reduce costs.
Whether being thin is beautiful is in the eye of the beholder. However, airlines could have an absolute benefit when it comes to transporting passengers who tend to be slimmer, as the Wall Street analysts at the financial firm Jefferies have just discovered.
In aviation, every gram counts, because the fuel needed to keep the aircraft, passengers and luggage in the air is expensive. For decades, engineers have been looking for ways to make airplanes lighter. Superfluous olive stones are removed from the on-board food, for example, or the thinnest paper is selected for print magazines. Everything serves one goal: less weight, less fuel consumption. Now a completely unexpected factor could provide new efficiency in aviation: the weight of passengers - reduced by means of the pharmaceutical industry.
According to the analysts, the trend of passengers losing weight is increasing. They see the reason for this in so-called GLP-1 drugs for the treatment of obesity. Thanks to slimming injections, around 7.6 million Americans have lost weight since 2022. Now new weight loss pills are coming onto the market that replace injections and are therefore easier to use. Fortunately for airlines, according to the analysts. Because the simple logic is: a leaner company means lighter aircraft. As fuel is consumed in direct proportion to the weight transported, every kilo of passenger weight lost reduces the burden on the Group's balance sheet.
"Airlines have a long tradition of looking for ways to reduce the weight of aircraft. Now medical advances could do this work for them," says the Jefferies report. The investment bank uses an example calculation for a Boeing 737 Max 8 to illustrate just how massive the impact could be: an average weight reduction of ten percent per passenger could save around 1.45 tons on board - around two percent of the maximum take-off weight. This would improve fuel efficiency by around 1.5 percent. For the four major US airlines (Delta, American, United and Southwest), this could save around 579 million US dollars on the projected fuel costs of 38.6 billion US dollars.
