It always ends this way, as McKinsey and Co. taught.
The reason Qantas is a basket case is because a Board and senior management have limited time and if that has to be spread across several business units then by definition less time is taken on each decision anD over time the quality of decisions is worse than those made be a better focused single entity competitor.
I knew Qantas was done for the minute they started their raft of Asian Jetstar ventures and Dixon started to talk about leveraged synergies and similar double talk and I said so at the time.
Qantas Board meetings by now must be very unpleasant affairs. Each member of the "Qantas group" will be vying for Board time and attention and some will be at screaming level in their quest fork resources. The result? A series of sub optimal ****ed up decisions as the Board and management try and please the majority and end up pleasing no one, least of all the shareholders.
To succeed, there must be ONE airline, Qantas, and everything else needs to be either rolled in, sold or shut down. That way their is ONE Board, dealing with ONE strategy, ONE set of financials and ONE set of customers. Even then you will segment the business, but all the lies, bull**** and artificial contrivances used to differentiate Jetstar from Mainline disappear overnight, and with it perhaps three layers of very, very expensive management.
Furthermore, while I mostly agree with Ben Sandilands, he misses one salient point about leasing costs - they have to be paid each month whether you made money or not and in a downturn, they will kill you.
My prediction is that Qantas will be sold for pennies to Emirates fairly soon. I would expect that QF have already briefed both sides of Parliament to the effect that the Qantas Sale Act needs to be amended to either facilitate the current behaviour to continue with foreign money or to allow a "capital restructure" to take place - which is a euphemism for Emirates to take a controlling interest.
Make no mistake, QANTAS, as you know it, is already dead. The blather about Virgin is not going to stay the executioners blade.
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