Thud and Blunder
My guess is that there will be another airline but one which loses as much money as NX (if not more, as most of the core costs are being locked in at the top of the cycle by a MAX workforce that will not be too bothered about building a cost-effective airline whilst they are being shafted by their lead shareholders).
The current KA management team will be replaced by a suitably nicotine-stained Air China/NX implant and the AOC will come through a bit late but by middle of next year.
So, who is this good news for?
Certainly for the various apparatchiks running NX who hold on to their positions for a little longer, and probably for a few guys from Air China who get to come down to Macau and play Big Brother.
Its also not bad news for pilots wanting a couple of years OK money with MAX/NX, a type rating and some solid hours out of Macau. Like Arrowhead says, NX knows enough about itself not to aspire to make money but it is focused on blocking anyone else from doing anything. Air China is their lender of last resort and they cannot accept "foreigners" on their patch. So job security should be OK for people ready to put up with all of the bollocks.
Its bad news for Macau; the aviation scene will stumble on for another couple of years with no significant internal change and most outsiders will just laugh. NX can't even make money in a monopoly environment...
Air Asia's own growth ex-Macau has highlighted that all of the rehearsed arguments about unsustainable routes are nonsense. The fault is with NX management (and implicitly with their shareholders for choosing, backing and retaining them).
Its bad news too for Viva in that they will continue to be stymied politically, running up bigger losses and making fresh investment for an undefined business plan extremely difficult to source. Ultimately they are as much of a political project as NX and MAX and have no scope for growth unless the politics changes. If they had options out of Macau they would not have an aircraft in Papua New Guinea and their founder would not have departed to Russia.
NX is symptomatic of Macau companies in general, although a particularly diseased case. Shun Tak is not much better but at least has a land bank it can trade on. Its like a scene from Night of the Living Dead, with the corporate corpses desparately gorging themselves in the last few hours before sunlight. Now, who brings the sunlight is a more interesting question...