Tiger Airways’ pan-Asian ambitions floundering with dire need for growth

With progress still to emerge on a series of pan-Asian joint-ventures, Tiger Airways is nearing a tipping point where it must decide if it can be a baby pan-Asian carrier to the more successful AirAsia and Jetstar, or if reality will constrain it to a limited and disconnected franchise network. The implications may make or break the airline group: stalled progress on joint ventures (JV) and a reduced network in Australia saw Tiger instead deploy capacity on its Singapore network. That proved too much, blowing out costs and causing the usually healthy operation to post a SGD12 million (USD9.3 million) loss for the quarter to 30-Sep-2011.

Expected poor performance in Australia as the carrier was impacted from a six-week imposed grounding saw the subsidiary post a SGD27.2 million (USD21 million) loss.