"The strong market share (21.2%) is of strategic advantage, as it will be the springboard for our future expansion, growth and profitability, besides insulating us from the turbulence in the domestic aviation industry."
The
opening up of the Indian aviation industry in the new millennium has thrown lots
of challenges to its players both in terms of capacity utilization and profitability.
The advent of many new players increased the choice for the customer alright,
but for the nascent airlines it created the problem of attracting new segments.
Air Deccan, which is one of the most prominent of the new airlines, has in a very
short period notched up a 21.2% share of market to become the second largest airline
after Jet. It expresses its approach to this problem directly in its vision statement:
"Empower every Indian to fly!" This Company Focus is an attempt to capture
and analyze what Air Deccan has been practising since its inception with a view
to see what the company can do in the future. It would be apt at this stage to
start with a brief history of the Indian aviation industry.
The
first flight by an Indian airline - of Tata Airline - stook off from Karachi (then
in India) to Mumbai on October 15, 1932 - almost seventy five years ago. The plane,
a small De Havilland Puss Moth, carrying mail, was piloted by JRD Tata, a scion
of the Tata family, who was later to become one of India's foremost industrialists.
Tata Airlines became a public limited company in 1946 under the name Air India
and very soon, launched its first international flight from Bombay to London in
June 1946. Around this time, eight more private airlines took flight in Indian
air space.
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