Profits keep rolling but growth is elusive for Jazeera Airways

Jazeera Airways is now six months into STAMP, the business programme designed to take the positive momentum from its financial turn-around programme and return the carrier to a growth trajectory. The programme is based around three key pillars: enhancing yields; improving the carrier's load factors to a modest 68% by 2014; and leading in market share on the routes it operates in and out of Kuwait.

All of this will be achieved while the carrier maintains the same network of 19 destinations out of Kuwait for the next three years.

Even though Jazeera Airways managed to report a record new profit of KWD3.8 million (USD13.5 million) in 1H2012, the first half of the year has not been an unqualified success for the carrier. While it turned its seventh and eighth consecutive quarterly profits, the carrier's passenger traffic and load factors have suffered due to the regional unrest in the Levant.