I don’t think much has changed either.
AirAsia’s Fernandes claims Tiger on drugs for starting Aussie operation
AirAsia chief executive Tony Fernandes says his rival, Tiger Airways, must have been "on drugs" when it decided to set up a domestic airline in Australia and says he has no plans to do the same.
However, the outspoken head of Jetstar's new alliance partner said he planned to increase the number of routes AirAsia flew out of Australia and hoped to launch Sydney services within six months.
"Am I going to come up and set up AirAsia Australia? No. Tiger is on drugs doing it," Mr Fernandes told The Australian Financial Review.
"You (Tiger) are sitting on a market of a billion people and you go and put half your capacity in a market of 24 million which has two pretty strong airlines; it doesn't make sense to me."
Singapore-based Tiger Airways yesterday launched a $S273 million ($214 million) initial public offering. It set up a domestic airline in Australia in 2007.
AirAsia operates a Perth-Bali service and its low-cost offshoot, AirAsia X, flies between Kuala Lumpur and Melbourne and the Gold Coast.
Mr Fernandes said he hoped to eventually be flying to Adelaide and Darwin. He expected to launch Sydney in six months after a long-running battle with the Malaysian government to get permission for a service into NSW.
"We are very bullish about the Australian market," he said. "Sydney is definitely six months away if we get all the rights approved. We think we have just got started. There is a whole lot of market we can achieve over the next number of years.
"We believe we can do many other points. Australians who have generally just gone to Bali are discovering Asia in a big way."
Mr Fernandes also revealed former Qantas chief executive Geoff Dixon had approached him in the past about buying AirAsia, something the Malaysian carrier was not keen on at the time.
"Geoff was a very acquisitive man and I think he would have loved to have bought AirAsia to be honest," Mr Fernandes said.
"We were not ready to be bought and we were not ready to report to anyone else."
Publicly listed AirAsia is Asia's biggest low-cost airline and has grown rapidly since it was set up eight years ago. It flies a fleet of mainly Airbus A320 aircraft from bases in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. Qantas rival Virgin Group owns a stake in AirAsia's spin-off, AirAsia X.
Mr Fernandes, who wears a red baseball cap and has been dubbed the Asian Richard Branson, said the "sky is the limit" in terms of his alliance with Jetstar and did not rule out a merger of AirAsia and Jetstar in the future, although nothing was on the table at the moment.
"If it made sense why not?" he said.
"On paper, if you say Jetstar is very strong in Australia, we are very strong in Asia.
"Jetstar is struggling in Asia, whatever those boys say . . .
"I ain't going to set up AirAsia Australia, so you could have a very strong Australian-Asian alliance which has always been talked about . . . these kind of things make sense."