Does somebody know if Jetstar Pacific has just been sold to an American company?
Not sure how it could be sold, VN Airlines owns 70%.
After reading the article below, who would want to buy it ?
The credibility gap between what Qantas says about its offshore Jetstar investments and their persistent failure to perform widened in Japan and Vietnam today.
Jetstar Japan’s success in hosing even more Qantas dollars against the wind has made it into the general media, in this lucid but restrained report in the Fairfax media.
There is something unsettling about the remorseless pattern of Qantas statements in recent years describing financial losses as ‘progress’. The Fairfax report’s figures show that Jetstar Japan accounted for $55 million of last financial year’s reported Qantas losses of an aggregate $70 million on its investments in Asia based Jetstar franchises in Singapore, Vietnam, Japan and the still born Hong Kong venture.
This means in round terms that Jetstar Japan lost all but $5 million of the $60 million it pumped into the Jetstar Japan venture last year, beside a similar investment by major partner Japan Airlines.
If that is what Qantas means by ‘progress’ it is time for its shareholders to do something about management’s grip on reality, and English. This disaster has been going on for years and despite all of the claims made about ‘progress’ and ‘opportunity’ and ‘potential’, the ventures have one and all been terrible and costly failures, and there is no reason to believe anything has changed, other than the announcement in February that expansion in Jetstar Asia (Singapore) had been paused, in order to ‘grow within its own footprint’.
The misuse of English is almost as troubling as the wasting of money. It means that Qantas is incapable of telling the truth about the Jetstar situation in Asia to its employees and investors, and continues to be in cloud cuckoo land as to its future.
No amount of PR babble speak is going to save Jetstar in Asia, unless it switches tactics and sells all or part of it for as much as possible, Sydney Harbour Bridge included.
Today’s unsettling news about Vietnam comes from an announcement that VietJetAir’s own first Airbus A320 has entered final assembly in Toulouse. VietJetAir is Vietnam’s first privately owned airline. It has been flying for half as long as Jetstar Pacific, also based in Vietnam, and has a leased fleet of 15 A320s in service, more than twice as many single aisle jets as has the Qantas minority owned Vietname Jetstar franchise, currently listed as being seven aircraft.
Jetstar Pacific is 70 percent owned by state held Vietnam Airlines, with Qantas holding the remaining 30 percent.
It has been made to look foolish by VietJetAir, which will soon take delivery of the first of 63 firmly ordered A320s both CEO and NEO versions, with purchase rights for a further 30 and the stated intention of keeping a further seven on lease for a fleet size of 100 possibly as soon as the early 2020s.
Why can’t Qantas get a single Jetstar franchise in Asia right? What is behind its chronic inability to produce sustainable and successful Jetstar operations anywhere in the Asia hemisphere? How much damage has the Jetstar in Asia fetish done to the overall financial performance of the Qantas group, and how does it extricate itself from this mess?
How much more ‘progress’ like this can a flying kangaroo bear?
And that fat short arsed, little Irish Poofter CEO, still got a nice pay rise?????
