Qantas and Virgin Australia: Assessing international strategy by numbers on the eve of results

As Qantas and Virgin Australia, at least temporarily, call a truce on their domestic market share battles, their focus of attention turns to international operations as they report their fiscal 2014 results on 28 and 29-Aug-2014. Neither has achieved its ideal position and there is undoubtedly a lot of head scratching going on among their strategy teams. Qantas in particular is expressly looking at cutting as much as USD1 billion in costs out of its international operations; and neither airline has yet been able to establish a sound foundation for a North Asian strategy.

In this short pre-results overview, we look at some indicative, publicly available, load factor statistics that may suggest where each should be heading in terms of laying down the basis for sustainable international strategies. There is a lot more to route planning than historic load factors, but it is a good place to start. No doubt more thinking will be exposed when the airlines report FY2014 financials.