TMFDeej (99.46)

Swine Flu Hammers Mexican Airports / A great chart on drillers

June 05, 2009 – Comments (2) | RELATED TICKERS: PAC , ASR , NE

The swine flu outbreak in Mexico is clearly having a devastating effect upon Mexican airports like PAC. Its May passenger traffic fell 36.6%, including a 43.7% drop in international traffic.  I don't believe that the third public Mexican airport, OMAB, has published its May traffic numbers yet.

Things wereeven worse at fellow Mexican airpirt operator ASR, where traffic fell a mind-blowing 50.7% year-over-year.

Adding insult to injury, Mexican authorities suspended the license of one of the airlines that frequents PAC's airports, Aviacsa because of safety violations. So far in 2009, Aviacsa accounted for 5.9% of the domestic passengers and 3.6% of the total passengers for PAC.  Aviacsa accounted for an even higher percentage, 5.0%, of ASR's total traffic.

Unless they've had their head buried in the sand, everyone knew that the traffic numbers were going to be bad. The question is whether numbers this bad were already baked into the cake.

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While perusing the latest copy of "Rig Zone" this morning, I came across an excellent chart on driller profitability:

Using the metric of day rates per rig, it appears as though Seadrill (SDRLF.PK) is the best run driller of the major public companies that were mentioned.  It consistently gets more money for its rigs than other drillers like Diamond Offshore (DO), Noble (NE), and Price (PDE).  Of course, there's a lot more that goes into whether a stock does well than this, but Seadrill might be worth a look for anyone who is interested in purchasing a driller.

Deej