Qatar Airways’ chief executive said the airline was adapting to a regional political dispute that has prevented it flying some routes, and that those restrictions would not necessarily push it into the red for the current financial year. <\/p>\n
“There is a possibility that we will post also a loss in our current financial year, but it’s only a possibility,” Akbar al-Baker told reporters at the Farnborough Airshow on Monday. <\/p>\n
The airline lost access to 18 cities in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt, and Bahrain in mid-2017, when those four countries cut ties with Qatar after accusing it of supporting terrorism. Qatar denies the allegation.<\/p>\n
The restrictions mean the company is set to post what al-Baker has said will be “a very large loss” for the financial year ended March 2018, but it has not been published yet. Al-Baker said this would be made public in the coming weeks. <\/p>\n
But for the current year, he said the airline might be able to mitigate the impact of the boycott, which includes a ban on using airspace over the four countries, meaning some of its flights have to take much longer routes. <\/p>\n
Qatar Airways is starting up to 18 new routes to offset the impact of the dispute, and said it could also make investments to help boost its results.<\/p>\n
“We will try to do investments which will give us returns to mitigate the negative impact on the bottom line of our company,” al-Baker said, without giving details. <\/p>\n
Qatar Airways is already an investor in British Airways-owner IAG, for example, owning about a 20 percent stake, and last year bought a stake in Italian carrier Meridiana.<\/p>\n
The CEO said he did not see the situation with the regional political dispute improving any time soon. <\/p>\n
Despite that, al-Baker said his airline was sticking to its orders for new plane deliveries and was confident that Boeing would deliver its new 777-X jet, for which Qatar has made a big order, on schedule despite reported delays.<\/p>\n
“I think they will be on time,” he said. <\/p>\n
Qatar Airways was only moderately hedged on fuel and might need to hedge more in future as the price of oil rises, al-Baker said. <\/p>\n
“I am concerned about the oil prices. For the time being Qatar Airways is moderately hedged … well if it comes I may have to (hedge),” he told Reuters, referring to a potential rise in oil prices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Qatar Airways’ chief executive said the airline was adapting to a regional political dispute that has prevented it flying some routes, and that those restrictions would not necessarily push it into the red for the current financial year. “There is a possibility that we will post also a loss in our current financial year, but it’s only a possibility,” Akbar al-Baker told reporters at the Farnborough Airshow on Monday. The airline lost access to 18 cities in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt, and Bahrain in mid-2017, when those four countries cut ties with Qatar after accusing it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[229],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-171234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil-aviation"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171234\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}