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Old 26th Aug 2022, 13:10
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AerialPerspective
 
Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: Australia
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Originally Posted by Paragraph377
And Brett Godfrey in the early days preceded the Borg when they floated the VB lemon. It had no assets as all aircraft were leased, except for a couple of ****boxes including CZQ. Virgin hasn’t owned airport terminals or infrastructure at all as far as I’m aware, at least not in the early days. Alan still has some wriggle room with assets he can sell to prop up the balance sheet. Maybe he will keep doing that until the bucket of assets is empty, he has maximised the share price as high as possible, and then he will pull the pin, leaving behind a skinned carcass?
Except that Godfrey ran a profitable airline for his entire time there. He's as good as said that what happened afterward, the billions spent was not what should have been done (he put it in a very diplomatic manner).

Also, it depends what type of leases. If the original 737s were on finance leases then some of them would be owned - in fact, one of the fears when Bain took over was that they would sell the airframes that were owned and lease them back to VA to recoup their investment (i.e. as with Toys-R-Us, make the takeover target pay for it's own takeover). So, VA must have owned several dozen of their airframes and it is entirely unreasonable to expect a start up CEO to have dozens of assets, especially aeroplanes, against an airline that by that time had been in business for nearly 80 years. I'm sure Q.A.N.T.A.S. Ltd. didn't have any assets on the 16th of November, 1920 when it was registered in Queensland, only 1000 Pounds paid-up-capital.

Qantas has plenty of assets and over $3bn in the bank. It went down to something like $1.5-2.0bn during the pandemic and is now back up at over $3bn. That's hardly emptying the coffers. Yes, they sold land, which they'd owned since the 40s or 50s and never done anything with and that was an exceptionally good move because when SWZ opens and traffic moves there, that land around the airport won't be worth sh-t.

Not saying Joyce is perfect, not by a long shot, but I find it very difficult to fault Godfrey having known how highly he was regarded by the staff, in absolute stark contrast to his successor, who was by all accounts, an egotistical popinjay and a wastrel.

The only mistake that Godfrey made, but I can see what would have led him to do so, was refusing the offer to buy the Ansett terminals in SYD and MEL for an extremely low price. Then again, Qantas never 'really' owned their terminals either, they were the beneficiary of 100 year or 50 year peppercorn leases offered to TN and AN decades ago to give them tenure. ALL of the airports are pushing to resume control when the leases end and QF quite cleverly enticed them to buy them out of the leases for hundreds of millions of dollars. That's not selling 'assets', that's no different to selling a 747 that you're going to retire anyway and leasing a new aircraft. Had QF kept the leases, they would have continued to have to pay out to maintain the buildings and then lose them in the end anyway. Now, if there's ever any major problem such as flooding or storm damage, it's SACL or APAM's problem.

Last edited by AerialPerspective; 26th Aug 2022 at 13:31. Reason: Corrected IATA Code for Western Sydney Airport
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