The Qantas Airways Limited (ASX: QAN) share price has not performed too well during this Thursday's trading day. At the time of writing, Qantas shares are currently down a hefty 1.02% to $4.36 a share.
That puts the airline at a 3.44% loss over the past trading week. As well as a loss of 6.34% for the past month. The Qantas share price is also currently down 11.3% year to date in 2021 so far. But is still up 15.8% over the past 12 months.
So we don't have to dig too deep into Qantas' more recent woes. The prospects of a return to unfettered domestic interstate travel have been crushed by outbreaks of the COVID-19 Delta variant across the country. Hope is also fading for the dream of a reopening of our international borders, even with individual 'bubbles', anytime soon as well.
So during this difficult time for the Qantas share price, it might be useful to take a look at how Qantas shares have reacted to lockdowns in the past today. Let's dig in.
Image source: Getty Images
How does the Qantas share price perform during lockdowns?
To start things off, here is a graph of the Qantas share price since the start of the 2020 calendar year (right before the onset of the pandemic):
As you can see, the largest and most dramatic move on this chart came during March and April 2020. That was when the entire ASX 200 experienced a nasty share market crash due to rapid lockdowns across the global economy. The ASX 200 peaked on February 21, 2020, and troughed on 23 March with a loss of roughly 34%. In contrast, the Qantas share price fell more than 65% over the same period.
During the period from August to October 2020, Melbourne was under strict lockdown, albeit while the rest of the country was enjoying a relatively high level of freedom. This lockdown in the country's second-largest state by population didn't seem to have much of an impact on the Qantas share price at the time. As you can see, Qantas shares actually appreciated quite a lot over this period.
But then we get to another outbreak – the December Sydney Northern Beaches scare of Christmas 2020. This outbreak began around mid-December 2020 and lasted until January. Over this difficult time, Qantas shares did take a hit, losing around 18.5% between 27 November 2020 and 29 January 2021.
What about Delta in 2021?
More recently, Qantas has also taken quite a substantial haircut in light of the multi-state Delta outbreak. Since the first 'week-long lockdown' for Sydneysiders that was announced on 25 June, Qantas shares have lost around 7.8% of their value. Ever since a prolonged lockdown became inevitable around the first few days of July, Qantas shares have lost more than 11%.
And that brings us to the present day. Qantas is clearly a company that is heavily impacted by COVID restrictions, and it's likely that we will continue to see the company under pressure until a national path out of this latest outbreak becomes clear.
At the current Qantas share price, the airline has a market capitalisation of $8.3 billion.
