Here's today's example of Qantas failing to have the right strategy.
Qantas the big loser as China Southern comes to Perth | Plane Talking
The SMH stories by Paul Sheehan and Clive Dorman were pathetic. And the Australian is so dull I couldn't read it to the end.
From Plane Talking.
Here we have China Southern wasting its time and money flying to somewhere in Australia without making them transfer between the international sides and domestic sides of Sydney Airport, and in their own quaint colors, while Qantas puts all its eggs into hip brands like Jetstar and Red Q, which sound like a video game and a dating agency in Asia, thus cunningly avoiding addressing the leisure and business markets of China with anything that actually uses the word ‘Australia’ or the image of something as universally recogniseable as Australian as a kangaroo.
The genius of the Joyce plan for Qantas continues to set my hair on fire. Hey, were going to get rich by not being Australian. Freeking brilliant. Can’t wait for the imminent announcement of the location of Red Q, the A320 airline with sleeper seats bigger than those on an A380 that is going to rip up those old fogy national carriers like Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific and indeed, struggling poor old China Southern (third largest airline in the world by head count) as their customers rush to book Fair Q or whatever it is called, and wherever it is based, and with whomever is supposedly going to bankroll the 51% stake that will ensure that it can be legitimately called a Singaporean or Malaysian flag carrier.
The institutional investors in Qantas are officially superbly entranced by the brilliance of the Joyce strategy, which will see them without dividends for how many more years, with a shrunken international Qantas brand that will diminish the attractiveness of its loyalty program and the synergies with the domestic full service brand which is under siege by that other bunch of losers at Virgin Australia.