lowerlobe
If the margins were not there I hardly doubt that an organisation would want to borrow around 80% of the total amount if they thought the business was not a good one or that it's potential to earn was decreasing.
OK then look at it another way... if the business was good and margins were high, why would the company be for sale in the first place?
If you look at recent acquisitions (say the flybe acquisition of BA Cityflyer, or the Air France acquistion of Cityjet), you will see that the purchaser radically altered the model and structure of the companies they took over. All they really kept was the staff and some of the routes in one case, and the staff and airframes in the other. An organisation looks at the potential revenues when evaluating a purchase, and often those revenues are nonexistent in the company they are looking at.
Secondly,If the margins are decreasing then why did QF make a record profit.It also appears that next years profit will be even larger so the idea that the margins are decreasing does not seem to hold up.
You have to look beyond the balance sheet and see exactly where those profits are coming from. Unless you know the true position with regard to fleet and airport slot transactions, it is hard to be certain how much of that profit is down to margins and yields. More to the point, increasing pax numbers + increasing peripheral sales will easily overcome decreasing margins. Just ask Easyjet, Ryanair or Virgin about that...
27/09
There were a lot of "politics" being played in the background and to blame the pilots strike for Ansett New Zealand's demise is being simplistic in the extreme.
There is ALWAYS a lot of politics in these situations... however, the fact remains that if the pilots hadn't gone on strike, the company would not have gone down the gurgler at that time. Maybe not long afterwards, who knows, but the pilots handed those who wanted ANsett NZ out of the way, the perfect excuse to shut it down. Not smart at all. No matter what was going on in the background, the strike was the catalyst.
cunning(?)linguist
So PAF, after 15 years or so of getting nowhere in NJS by doing the right thing, what do you suggest the NJS pilots do
Move on...
It is always the standard reply " no money in this contract "
Have you ever stopped to consider that maybe, just maybe, there really isn't any money in that contract? No, because in your cynical little world, airline management have only one reason to live - to screw pilots.
I have worked for a few companies where the management was literally holding the operation together by their fingernails. It would have been easier to have just taken their money and gone home - these guys were working 18 hour days - but they didn't, and one of the reasons was commitment to their staff (who, of course, just bitched and moaned the whole time).
Maybe NJS is like that, maybe not, but just assuming that there is an endless pot of money to fund the aspirations of 3rd level pilots is incredibly naive. Taking industrial action will not increase the size of that pot, in fact it will dramatically decrease it.