By Jan Korselt

PRAGUE,(Reuters) - Czech Airlines (CSA), slated for privatisation next year, has not seen the drop in demand that has hurt some of its peers and is on track to meet its full-year break-even target, Chief Executive Radomir Lasak said.
Lasak told Reuters in an interview cleared for publication on Wednesday that high oil prices would add 300 million crowns ($15.35 million) to the firm's fuel bill in 2008 compared with last year, which it has offset through cost cuts.
"This year, we have not felt (the economic crisis) in any dramatic way, when I see how tickets have been booked until the end of the year," Lasak said.
He said the airline's full-year target is unchanged "at the moment", though it would be "very ambitious" to make forecasts for 2009 given the volatile state of the market.
In the past three years, CSA has slashed costs and sold non-core activities such as cargo and catering, after earlier overly-ambitious investments in fleet expansion.
The group posted on Wednesday a 124 percent year-on-year jump in pretax profit to $22.05 million in the first nine months, according to international accounting standards (IFRS).
Revenue climbed to $1.12 billion from $876.8 million, CSA said, while passenger traffic increased 4.9 percent to 4.4 million in that time.
Lasak said the firm was in a better position to withstand the global slowdown than some of its rivals.
Industry body IATA has estimated airlines are set to post losses of $5.2 billion this year, as stagnating demand for air traffic hurts ailing airlines already hit by high oil prices.
"Of course, a further outlook (beyond this year) is a big question mark. Volatility is huge in all markets, it would be very ambitious to predict anything at this moment," Lasak said.
"We do not have to implement any radical steps that you can see other airlines are doing -- that they have grounded airplanes, and cut workforce."
"This is not a sale in need," Lasak said, referring to the planned privatisation.
Lasak's upbeat comments were in contrast to indebted peer Austrian Airlines, which called for quick decision on its sale last week, warning that any dramatic development in the industry could endanger the process.

CASH RESERVE
Lasak said the full-year target of "slightly positive break even" excluded a one-off gain worth hundreds of millions of crowns from a real estate swap with state-owned Prague Airport.
The swap, agreed in October, will help the firm create a cash reserve to cushion the impact of the credit crisis.
Some foreign banks affected by the crisis have cut credit limits, Lasak said, but other credit lines remain in place.
"In the course of one or two years we would like to create a liquidity reserve in the order of 2 billion crowns ($99.60 million)," he said.
The Czech government has confirmed plans to complete the sale of a 91.5 percent stake in CSA in the first half of 2009.
Lasak did not comment on the sale price, which some analysts see around 4 billion crowns, nor potential bidders.
The only company that has shown interest so far is Russia's Aeroflot, CSA's fellow member of the SkyTeam alliance, which also includes Air France-KLM, Alitalia, Delta Air Lines, Korean Air.
Lasak said CSA could become a takeover target for either a strategic or a financial investor, though greater interest could be expected from companies based in the former Soviet Union or Asia, which could use Prague as a hub to western Europe.