@chairwrecker and eatbulaga bring up good points.
We have to look beyond and beneath the reasons why PAL has lost money while other Legacy carriers start to recover. It's not enough to accuse senior management of "cooking the books" para mukhang lugi. Annual financial statements have shown that some years were profitable and some were not.
If you have to do that, then we must at least look at the balance sheets, the cash flow statements and the income statements from the past years and scrutinize the figures.
If they are suspicous, then we must question the accuracy and integrity of SGV which annually provides an independent assesment of said statements.
While it is true that the spun-off companies have become profitable, its revenues are peanuts compared to PAL's annual revenue and I don't think their profits alone would make LT happy. Remember that he is
an ego-driven businessman who fancies himself as a rags-to-riches story with delusions of grandeur and relevance by acquiring national entities like PAL and PNB and making them profitable. Not being able to turn them around or making them successful wounds his considerable pride.
Transpac flights may be full going to the US but are quite lean coming back. And PAL does get 60% or more of its revenues from international and regional flights. Lesser pax translates to lesser
RPK (revenue per kilometer) against a fixed cost-per-kilometer. The real decline of passenger revenue (due to the recession) against relatively higher fixed costs (due to a bad hedging bet for one) has produced lesser yields.
Fact of the matter is PAL's legacy cost structure has been exposed and found wanting against the phenom of the LCC after deregulation of the industry.
One tangible quantitative measure is the ratio of employee to aircraft. Leaner legacy carriers have standards of about 115:1, LCCs (like CebuPac) have about 80-90:1. PAL in its current structure has about 180 employees per aircraft.
Most legacy carriers either operate an extensive hub and spoke network or have a significant high-yield pax core (business class pax) that contribute to better profit margins. PAL doesn't have this to lean on. PAL depends on a mix of the OFW, Balikbayan and domestic/regional tourist market which are more akin and vulnerable to LCC operations (except for long-haul).
Hence, fighting the LCCs in a price war only leads to lower yields on PAL's profit margins.
Fuel costs have also grown from 30% to now more than 40% of the cost structure. It doesn't help that fuel hedging bets went awry. While folks in finance have been let go (landing a plum job in SM with Ramon Ang and the other promoted to CEO of AirPhil), it's the poor laborers who got the raw end by being retrenched for their bad decisions.
And in legacy carriers throughout the world, be it British Airways, Mexicana or Air France, it's always been labor that has borne the brunt of cost-cutting measures that have had to be implemented because of mismanagement.
Most importantly, their seems to be a lack of vision or strategic thinking (or is this deliberate?) on what they would want PAL to be. Do you continue to challenge everyone with a price war and maintain hegemony over Transpac and regional flights while CebuPAc marches on or do you spin-off all domestic flights and certain regional routes to AirPhil and concentrate on the international/regional mixed market?
And therein the fault lies in the ineffectiveness of ownership and management in carving out a vision for the company, relying instead on reactionary measures and plodding through the years with half-measures.
This is where you can envy CebuPac's Lance Gokongwei who has maintained a vision and tight discipline on what they want to do (spurning his father who wanted to go long-haul, rebutting him that it was not their business model).
Sadly, for the people who were with the company way before LT and his minions, the tragedy goes on.
