American Airlines Group Inc. (AAL) Presents at Goldman Sachs Industrials and Materials Conference 2025 Transcript

Catherine O’Brien
Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., Research Division

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for staying with us today, final panel of the day, always an exciting time. I’m Catie O’Brien. I’m the lead equity analyst covering the U.S. airlines and the aircraft leasing companies. Today, I have the great pleasure of speaking with Devon May, Chief Financial Officer of American Airlines. Thanks so much for being with us, Devon.

Devon May
Executive VP & CFO

Well, thank you for having me.

Catherine O’Brien
Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., Research Division

Of course. And I think you wanted to start with just a couple of minutes of prepared remarks, then we’ll jump in.

Devon May
Executive VP & CFO

Sure. That’s great. I’d just start by saying we are really excited about 2026. We’re ready to turn the calendar and head into our centennial year. We think the company is incredibly well set up. And just starting from a finance perspective, there’s been a lot of great progress on the balance sheet. This has been a multiyear effort since we came out of COVID, but we had debt levels of $54 billion when it peaked out in COVID. We’ve reduced that. We hit our first target, which was to reduce it by $15 billion by the end of 2025. We achieved that in 2024. We’ve set another target now to get total debt below $35 billion by the end of 2027, and we’re making really nice progress there. We continue to be a leader in terms of cost efficiency. It’s an effort that we call reengineering the business, but we have a group set up that’s effectively a transformation