Exactly Worrals - Qantas should get on with it's core business of running a successful end-of-line carrier much as Air New Zealand have been doing since they almost went to the wall in 2001.
Too much of Alan Joyce's time in the last two years has been spent trying to find merger partners and other such deals and before him Geoff Dixon dropped his eyes off the ball to set up the near-disastrous APA bid. All this time Qantas has been allowed to wither on the vine. The staff know it and the public know it - only the public have voted with their feet.
In going to Asia with a greenfields operation we have another chapter in what is considered a smart business move by management and by some in the market. However in reality it's just another iteration of the same diversion from what should be the main game and that's running the existing airline with all it's valuable human capital and other capital to best level that it can be run at.
It's easier for AJ to set up a greenfields operation and to start with a clean sheet than to deal with the existing business in an imaginative and productive manner. That is the mark of a man with no ideas who is just re-running his Jetstar playbook line by line. JB is arguably doing the same at Virgin, but engagement of staff and investment in product works in the longer term!
Management argue that they can't afford to invest any longer in the international Qantas business until it improves it's return on the existing cost of capital - the death spiral has begun then because mainline needs investment now to compete. Reducing the size of the network will reduce market share which will in turn lead to lower revenue for the operation over and above what costs can be reduced in that time.
My prediction is that Jetstar Japan may survive on a marginal basis, but the Asian premium carrier will not be successful in the longer term. By then AJ will have parachuted away with his pot of gold and some of the Qantas employees here today will still have a job (...just). At that time someone new will have to come in and truly rebuild the brand. They might have to do it with an amendment of the Qantas sale act though that allows a major foreign partner to make an investment, because by then Qantas will have no funds left to work with. Of course the capital is there now to fix mainline but they won't do it.
