India’s largest airline IndiGo expects Tata Sons to be “formidable competition” once the conglomerate finalises its $2.4 billion purchase of Air India from the government, the budget airline’s chief executive said.<\/p>\n
Tata also owns a majority stake in Vistara, a premium joint venture with Singapore Airlines Ltd, as well as budget airline AirAsia India.<\/p>\n
“I see them as formidable competition but I welcome them. It is a sensible thing,” IndiGo CEO Ronojoy Dutta told a CAPA Centre for Aviation event on Wednesday, in a pre-recorded interview.<\/p>\n
The government announced on Friday that Tata would resume control of Air India, marking the end of years of struggle to privatise the financially troubled airline.<\/p>\n
“I think they will become more economically responsible,” Dutta said of Air India. “Having a large player funded by taxpayers is not fair competition for us.”<\/p>\n
IndiGo controls more than half of the Indian domestic market but its international operations are far smaller than Air India’s.<\/p>\n
Dutta said IndiGo was focused on flights within seven hours of India using narrowbody planes, while Air India was more focused on full-service long-haul operations, leaving plenty of room in the market for both.<\/p>\n
In the domestic market, low-cost carrier Akasa Air, backed by billionaire Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, expects to take to the skies next year.<\/p>\n
One of Akasa’s co-founders, Aditya Ghosh, spent a decade with IndiGo and was credited with its early success.<\/p>\n
Dutta said he viewed Akasa as less of a competitive threat than Tata’s airlines over the next two to three years because it would take time for the new entrant to build up operations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
India’s largest airline IndiGo expects Tata Sons to be “formidable competition” once the conglomerate finalises its $2.4 billion purchase of Air India from the government, the budget airline’s chief executive said. Tata also owns a majority stake in Vistara, a premium joint venture with Singapore Airlines Ltd, as well as budget airline AirAsia India. “I see them as formidable competition but I welcome them. It is a sensible thing,” IndiGo CEO Ronojoy Dutta told a CAPA Centre for Aviation event on Wednesday, in a pre-recorded interview. The government announced on Friday that Tata would resume control of Air India, marking […]<\/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-442481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil-aviation"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442481","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=442481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442481\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=442481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=442481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}