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On Wednesday, 28 May 2025, Blade Air Mobility (NASDAQ:BLDE) presented at the 3rd Annual Jefferies eVTOL / AAM Summit, outlining its strategic vision and operational performance. The company’s leadership discussed its profitability, market expansion, and the anticipated integration of eVTOL aircraft. While Blade is capitalizing on its asset-light model and strong market position, challenges remain in the competitive landscape of urban air mobility.
Key Takeaways
- Blade Air Mobility has achieved profitability and is expanding its market share in both passenger and medical transport.
- The company is preparing for the integration of eVTOL aircraft, with initial deployment expected in the Middle East by late 2025 or early 2026.
- Blade’s asset-light model provides flexibility and positions the company well for future growth.
- The medical transport segment is experiencing significant growth, driven by increased demand for organ transplants.
- Blade maintains a strong balance sheet with approximately $120 million in cash and no debt.
Financial Results
Passenger Business:
- Profitable with an expected $6 million in adjusted EBITDA.
- Targeting high single-digit margins.
- Average checkout for an airport flight is over $300.
Medical Business:
- Margins are moving from low teens to high teens.
- Organic growth in contractual business at a high single-digit rate.
- Purchased 10 aircraft, improving operating leverage.
Overall Financial Health:
- Expecting incremental single-digit EBITDA growth for the year.
- Clean balance sheet with $120 million in cash and no debt.
Operational Updates
Passenger Segment:
- Dominant in the Northeast US and a leading provider in Europe.
- Utilizes dynamic pricing to optimize utilization and revenue.
- Focused on convenient landing zones and brand building.
Medical Segment:
- Gaining market share through new customer wins.
- Partnership with Organox to enhance service efficiency.
- Notable transport of a human organ from Maine to Alaska.
Future Outlook
eVTOL Integration:
- Anticipating deployment in the Middle East by late 2025/early 2026, and in the Northeast US by late 2027/2028.
- eVTOL expected to unlock growth opportunities by expanding landing zones.
Market Expansion:
- Continuing to gain market share in core medical transport markets.
- Exploring new verticals in time-critical cargo across healthcare.
Q&A Highlights
- Blade’s most important intellectual property is its brand, recognition, and trust.
- The technology stack integrates booking with logistics, enhancing operational efficiency.
- Data from the app is used to optimize marketing and personalize customer experiences.
In conclusion, Blade Air Mobility’s strategic focus on profitability, market expansion, and eVTOL integration positions it well for future growth. For more details, refer to the full transcript below.
Full transcript – 3rd Annual Jefferies eVTOL / AAM Summit:
Greg Conrad, Jefferies Aerospace and Defense Equity Research Team, Jefferies: Good morning, everyone. I’m Greg Conrad with the Jefferies Aerospace and Defense Equity Research Team. Welcome to our third annual Jefferies EV TALL Summit. Today, we are lucky enough to have Rob Wiesenthal, CEO of Blade as well as Will Hayburn, CFO, here with us. Maybe just to kick it off, if you can provide a little bit of background on Blade, what markets do you operate in, and how do you broadly think about the opportunity in the business?
Rob Wiesenthal, CEO, Blade: Sure. Thanks a lot for, having us. I appreciate it. We’re actually dialing in remote from, our Arizona operations, here where our medical business is, based. But let’s talk about the business, how we got started.
We started the company about, we’re working on our eleventh year, so ten full years of operations. It started out, as a company, to do short distance aviation predominantly with helicopters. But the thesis of the company was always how do you create an ecosystem for short distance aviation, focus on helicopters that can enable you to transition to eVTOL, when they are ready. So that’s every part of the ecosystem from captive infrastructure, technology, brands, consumer to cockpit software, roots, marketing, customer experience, all that. But doing it on an asset light basis, because at some point, we knew that we would need to be preparing for that transition.
I think I can’t be more excited about where we are in the in vitro, you know, timeline because it really is it’s a short term horizon. I can’t I couldn’t have said that when we went public four years ago, but I can really say that now. It’s now the time we’re talking in terms of months, and no longer, years. So we started out, working in leisure markets in in the Greater New York area. We quickly added probably one of our most important businesses, which is an airport business that operates six days a week, every twenty minutes to New York and JFK Airports, in New York where we’ve, kinda shattered the Uber Black pricing.
It starts at a hundred $95. People buy airport passes for $695 a year where they can fly for $95. So we’re competitive with Graham. We’re one of one in the markets we serve. The next biggest market is Europe.
Southern Europe. That’s Monaco, Nice, Cannes, Saint Tropez, in the winter, Courschavel, Geneva, Milan, all of Southern Europe, and it’s all about great landing zones. And I think one of the things that people discovered about Blade is that, you know, we’re not trying to boil the ocean. It’s all about great convenient landing zones. And I think we have the two most important markets in the world, the Northeast and The United States, and in Southern Europe.
But along the way, we saw an incredible opportunity, and that was to use the logistics expertise that we have, and the relationships we had with operators, the technology base, the team, to move, human organs for transplants, specifically hearts, livers, and lungs. That started out in New York, and today, we’re now the largest air transporter of human organs, in The United States. It’s now a it’s about 60%, of our business. Yeah. Highly profitable, great profit margins, terrific growth, and, you know, definitely leverages a lot of our core competencies.
And I actually think that in the future, you know, certain mission profiles that we do in the medical side, you know, will be aided by VTOL. And so, you know, profitability came a year early, earlier than we expected to the market. You know, we’ll have about $6,000,000 of adjusted EBITDA on the on the passenger side, and we’ll probably add another incremental single digit of EBITDA, you know, for the full year. And we haven’t even lapped the structural changes that we made, including, you know, Europe and some other things that, you know, we’ve been working on. And the passenger business has, you know, strong margins.
You know you know, we’ve been talking about, you know, double digit margins, high double digit margins. You have strong potential there. And, again, we’re the largest. And passenger, we’re one of one, and we’re the largest in the medical business. So two terrific businesses with different but great, profiles from a financial, financial performance perspective.
And I think, you know, the company’s working on all cylinders, very pleased, with the financial performance and having overall adjusted EBITDA for the company for the first time this year, really clean balance sheet, about a hundred and $20,000,000 of cash, no debt. So I think, you know, we’re, you know, pretty well positioned, you know, where we are right now.
Will Hayburn, CFO, Blade: And, Greg, just to clarify on those on those margins there. You know, on on the medical side, we’re moving from the low teens to the high teens. And on the passenger side, we’ve gone from from, you know, not making a profit to now having a target of the high single digits for passenger.
Greg Conrad, Jefferies Aerospace and Defense Equity Research Team, Jefferies: And that kind of answers where I was going go with my next question. But I mean, kind of within that and that mix of medical and passenger, I mean, anything in terms of passenger seasonality or kind of how that allows you to utilize capacity just thinking about the the growth profiles of of medical versus passenger?
Rob Wiesenthal, CEO, Blade: Well, I’ll I will talk about, let me talk about passenger, and then I’ll lead in a little bit of medical, and then, we’ll give some expansion on that. The passenger business is largely, is has very, has very skewed right now to, from a seasonality perspective in Europe and in The United States. And, frankly, being asset light helps us because that allows us to kind of flex the our capacity that we need to make sure there aren’t ships lying around with pilots. So we enter into, capacity use agreements or long term contracts, with our operators. A lot of many of them are dedicated solely to Blade.
Many of them actually have built their companies around Blade, and we but they also have other operations. Sometimes it could be news operations or other types of, you know, government contracts, and they enter exclusivity arrangements with us. They pass our safety standards with very large safety team, which is obviously critical to us. They use our technology, understand our customer experience. But there’s that flex between on season and off season for leisure.
But at the same time, as our prices go down and you think about Europe, especially places like Monaco and elsewhere in Milan, where it’s much more, it’s less seasonal, and the fact that we have a winter business in the Alps, and the airport business in New York, you know, we’re we are trying hard to kind of reduce the reliance, you know, just on, you know, kind of the spiky seasonal perspective. But being asset light right now does, equip us, you know, with two strengths. One is to be able to flex that capacity depending on demand and seasonality, but also to put us in a great position to help, you know, make that transition between conventional, helicopters, and eVTOL. And, Will, do you wanna just talk about the medical side for a second?
Will Hayburn, CFO, Blade: Yeah. Look. The medical business is a little bit of a different profile, and then it’s a contractual business. It is not seasonal. It can have some lumpiness, but it’s a great high single digit growing market organically, and then we’re continuing to add share through new customer wins.
