AirAsia Group Chief Executice Officer Tan Sri Tony Fernandes is confident that loss-making long-haul airline AirAsia X will be profitable in the 2015 financial year.
In achieving profitability, Fernandes said the airline would revise revenue strategy, increase ancillary income and undergo capacity management.
"For AirAsia X, most losses came from Australia, so we are rationalising a bit of capacity in that market, and there is a little bit of demand drop from China after the MH370 incident.
"However, we are seeing demand coming back whereby demand from China has rebounded to normal while the rest of the market has been fairly good," he told a press conference after announcing AirAsia Asean Pass.
The pass enables travellers to utilise pre-purchased credits to book flights at a fixed rate across selected routes throughout Asean.
Fernandes noted that there was an upside to AirAsia X's ancillary income, given that its parent company AirAsia's ancillary income had grown by 15 per cent.
"We are seeing yields improving quite quickly for the fourth quarter, 2014 is a tough year and 2015 will be better for AirAsia X," he said.
On moves to save cost, the aviation tycoon announced that the airline would defer the deliveries of aircraft for the next two to three years in Malaysia, as well as merge some of AirAsia and AirAsia X's departments.
"An external factor that is beneficial for our turnaround plan is the current downtrend in oil prices. On fuel hedging, we do not speculate, we just match our revenue with our cost.
"We hedge according to the booking curve whereby if we sell 50 per cent of our seats in advance, we will hedge 50 per cent three months ahead," he said, adding that the airline had a massive upside in fuel as it only hedged 12 per cent for 2015.
FBP FBP WGM
Bernama
Thu Nov 20 2014
Fernandes noted that there was an upside to AirAsia X's ancillary income, given that its parent company AirAsia's ancillary income had grown by 15 per cent. - File Photo
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