Originally Posted by
Lookleft
Or it could be good management. QF survived the Asian financial meltdown in the mid 90's, They then coped with 9/11, SARS the GFC and now this. It could very well be the case that the reason they did drip feed aircraft orders is they were aware of the effects of sudden downturns and its effect on the bottom line. That they were very quickly able to convert assets in to cash suggests they had a "black swan event" business plan ready to go.
Yeah, I grudgingly feel this is right. In addition to learning from those crises, it could also be that Joyce learnt from the massive orders he inherited - Qantas has spent years pushing back the last 8 A380s which have no obvious place on the route map, and cancelled 35 B787s which would have arrived right as QF was trying to deal with the ME3 taking over as the dominant hub-and-spoke operators. Qantas seems to be able to restructure the group A320/1neo order multiple times with little difficulty (which I presume they've been able to do, because they built flexibility into the contract), and has been able to pick up exactly as many 787s as it wants to fly key routes. Making massive bets on what the future will look like is inherently risky; giving yourself the flexibility to match the fleet to the times helps manage that risk - to me, that's good management.
The other part, that I think gets overlooked in the whole 'share buybacks' debate, is that QF has been buying the 787s outright, as well as paying back and extending its debt, which means it seems to have had pretty easy access to finance in this crisis.