Air India Express, the international budget airline wholly owned by Air India, expects the net profit in the current fiscal to exceed its target for the year despite rise in fuel cost and softening of demand in the Gulf route.
However, it is expected to fall short of last year’s level. After earning a net profit of Rs 297 crore in 2016-17 following robust growth in the last couple of years, the airline had set a lower target of Rs 208 crore for the current year taking into account 7 to10% jump in fuel cost and uncertainties in passenger traffic to Gulf region.
The profit has already surpassed the target and has reached Rs 231 crore for nine months ended December, 2017. “Since February and March are lean months, we may reach anywhere between Rs 225 to 250 crore by the end of the year despite the challenges,’’ said K Shyamsundar, CEO of the airline. Marginally better occupancy rate of 78% reflected an increase in passenger traffic to 4 million from 3.4 million a year ago. At present around 90% of Air India Express flights are to the Gulf countries.
Air India Express is set to expand operations in the summer schedule that will start from March 25, by raising weekly departures to 586 from current 561. Consequently the aircraft utilisation will go up to 13.5 hours per day from 12.8 hours at present.
It is also leasing two additional aircraft from Boeing, which will be inducted in September and October taking the total leased aircraft of Air India Express to 8. The airline owns another 17 aircraft. “We expect the things to look up this year with Kannur airport coming up,’’ Shyamsundar said.
In the summer schedule, Air India Express will launch three weekly flights from Kochi to Singapore via Madurai that will make the airline’s operations from Madurai to Singapore a daily one. There will be a new connections from Kochi to Al Ain and to Ras Al Khaimah and several new ones from the Gulf to Thiruvananthapuram via Kozhikode.
Induction of three round-robin flights connecting Kochi to Kuwait and Dhammam, daily flights in the Kochi-Doha-Kochi sector, improvement in the operations on Thiruvananthapuram-Kozhikode-Doha and Kochi-Kozhikode-Bahrain are the other major changes.
