By Roy Weavers

Qantas Group has announced a pre-tax profit of $90 million for the six months ended 31 December 2009, compared to a $288m profit in the comparative half year in 2008/09.

Chief executive Alan Joyce said that while international yields are improving, they continued to “lag behind” the recovery of the domestic market.

“The global downturn significantly affected international premium traffic in particular and therefore revenues, although domestic leisure demand remained strong,” Joyce said.

Qantas said it has managed to cut costs by more than 11% on a net decline in capacity of 2% compared to the prior half year.

Editors comments: I can't help looking at these figures and thinking that they've brought most of this upon themselves.  If you keep cutting routes you can't take the money and if you don't take the money you can't make a profit.  If they would just put some routes back on to the far north we all be able to make some money.