The future of Ansett Australia, and to some extent its parent company 'Air New Zealand' has dominated news headlines in Australia recently, particularly in the last 48 hours. They are apparently losing up to $1.3 million a day. Even Qantas has rejected offers to buy out what has been its main source of competition for the past decade. Does anyone have any thoughts or comments as to the probability of Ansett surviving? I personally think it would be a shame to lose them, for the sole reason that they have so much history in this country, and that it would become an awful problem for the 15000 odd people they employ. Also, I am also wondering how Air New Zealand will be affected. How could something like this affect their operations? If anyone has any information about the situation, it would be greatly appreciated!
cardomumT
8th Sep 2001, 09:39
ALL conjecture of course until we here what financial plan is in place. But - the name Ansett will probably continue, whoever takes on the task of managing AN be it the present management or some new faces they will have to make significant changes to make AN a viable entity. This has been a VERY hot topic on D&G, some very good comment but who really knows what is going on behind the scenes, SQ may still be interested at some level but it would appear that the Australian Government at least are ruling out public money.
I guess we can't look at this in isolation of the NZ situation, any change to the governing arrangement of AN will have an impact on their business as well - quite a proportion of AN and NZ has already been integrated at all areas in the group. As I said in D&G, AN operate a primarily domestic product which is largely low yeild, QF have a much wider portfolio and can spread cost more effectively than AN, lets face it AN are a high cost airline combine that with low yeild and you have a problem, VB and SJ overcome that due to their low cost operating structure.
You have to change a lot in an organisation to stop it losing $1.3 mil a day, regrettably those changes will probably be painful. There are some things they can do in regard to fleet financing, fuel purchase, handling, etc but that doesn't account for the kind of figures being banded about in the media if in fact they are accurate. Once the airline has been refinanced there will have to be a [major] change to the operating structure to stop it heading straight back to this stage again.
Best of luck to all those in AN, I am sure we all look forward to a satisfactory resolution to this problem
See the numerous threads on Dunnunda and Godzone...........