IndiGo Airlines, CEO, Pieter Elbers at the CAPA Airline Leader Summit Airlines in Transition 2025

Transcript

Pieter Elbers:Clearly, IndiGo is in a phase of incredible growth of the aviation market in India. And IndiGo is very much a domestic airline, quickly on our way to become more and more international. And obviously, KLM was only international and like a global airline with a lot of widebodies. So there's a lot of differences really, and the orientation for us at IndiGo today is becoming more and more international. You know, let me start with the big opportunity which is out there. The Indian market is changing a lot, and still the number of air travelers as a percentage of the population is a single-digit number. So that in itself is actually a huge opportunity going out there. But it's not only the people basically moving from trains to planes, it's also very much so the aspirational traveler, and the aspirational traveler wants to go international. The business aspirational traveler, the long-haul traveler. And I think for us, being the market leader in India, the opportunity is out there to serve also that part of the market. And the India of today clearly is a very different India as it compared to the India of 18 years ago when the company was founded. So for us, it makes a lot of sense to start moving and adjusting parts of our product portfolio, not everything, parts of our product portfolio to that new reality. Of course, there's risks in terms of, of You know, you add some complexity and with complexity you add cost. But we believe that our cost focus and our cost leadership are deeply, deeply rooted in the company. And we keep it— we keep an eye on that and we make sure that the upside in terms of additional revenues is clearly outweighing any potential additional costs. Well, clearly the priority of further internationalization is there. And today we have around 27%, 28% of our network is international in terms of available seat kilometers. We have doubled our international destinations over the past few years. We had 20, today we have 40. We have 90 domestic destinations, 91 to be precise. And the big challenge clearly is to make sure that the infrastructure we're having and the entire ecosystem is actually keeping pace and keeping track with the enormous growth of the markets and that internationalization, which is also have like connectivity which was less so in the past. But building India into a global aviation hub is clearly requiring some different elements. Well, the fleet today is a narrowbody-only operator. We have around 400 aircraft, which is some 50 ATR and 350-ish Airbus A320 and A321s. That percentage is changing going forward because we'll be adding one plane, one Airbus A320 each and every week going forward. We will be getting the XLRs coming in later this year. So that's another opportunity for us. And then the widebodies are coming in as from '27 where we ordered the 350s.

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