Patee Sarasin Talks About His Next Venture

Transcript

Patee Sarasin:DDG is a holding company where I'm going to be launching a whole new brand of travel company. I can't tell you all the details yet because it's highly confidential and it's, it's totally blue ocean and it's going to be the company that integrates between the airline business and into the travelling itself in such a way that we're not taking away the yield of the airlines. So in other words, we're going to make sure that we know exactly the constraints and the opportunities you can use while doing this. It's a total package. You're going to see it in July, around July hopefully. We're going to launch that particular brand in July and it's going to be quite an interesting mode when this happens. Because it's going to benefit airlines, a lot beneficial to the airlines itself. It's a global company. It's going to be launched all over the place. Basically, it's going to be based in— that's why we're launching it in London. It's going to be a total global company and very artificial, have a lot of AIs involved in it, and state-of-the-art at the moment. So it's going to be quite good. The key element that is hampering the aviation industry is not the fact that it's not popular. but the fact that the capacity growth is way too fast for the market growth to follow. So at the end of the day, the price war started to loom, basically, and that's what's causing the issues of the yields dropping, and hence lots of airlines are not making money. Now, AirAsia is a different ballgame because of the fact that they are actually more international appeal now. They're flying all over the place across Asia, so they're You know, their advantage is the fact that they're not dependent only on Thailand as a country itself and our domestic market. Nok Air is too slow in terms of expanding. We penetrate into China, yes, quite successfully as a scheduled charter, but still it's not enough in terms of the revenue share percentage in order to make sure that the company is going to be successful. Given the fact that domestic market yields has dropped at least 10 to 15% on an annual basis. I have to give credit to Piyar, the new CEO. He surely believes that to unbundle everything— I'm not— I actually do not quite agree to that particular concept because what it does, it drove us into the red ocean as a me-too comparatively to AirAsia or, you know, the likes. So that particular part, I did not quite agree on that particular move. Now, 5, 3 months forward from that launch of the product, what you find is that a lot of people are buying the cheap tickets and not really— and still the revenue, although it's much, much higher today, still does not substantiate if we had the original Construct of the fares, you know, the structure that we had before. So that's a bit about— for me, it's a bit of a disappointment there, but that's the way it goes. The CEO says so. Well, my participation in Nok Air is absolutely zero in terms of official, but what I try to do is obviously all my staff, my team is still there. feeding information that I think is necessary sometimes to give a warning or advice to Piyat, the new CEO. He was my number 2 all along, so it hasn't been difficult to communicate that to him and also to convince also the shareholders as well, because 43% of the shareholders today are not airline business driven. I think NokScoot is going to do very, very well. I'm going to be very honest with you. Into markets like Japan, Korea, or even China, the slots are, you know, going away. So the widebody plays a bigger role in terms of driving that. And also the cost per unit, the CAS will be much, much lower against the competition who has a 737-900 maybe. So you can see where the competition is going to be, and I think NokScoot will do very well in that market. Singapore Airlines, They're very professional. They have the mandate and they have the way that they operate. You can see that it's absolutely professional. And more to that, they're very— they're friends as well. So when we work with Scoot and SQ or whatever, they're more like friends than anything else at the moment. And we can see it coming, going forward that way. For Nok Air, with Thai Airways, well, like I said to you in the congregation over there, that I had some issues over time with the Thai Airways. The management structure is always different. Every time the management change, we go through issues in different ways, sometimes positive, sometimes negative. So that— the consistency has never been there. So that's where puts us in a sort of a still spot rather than, you know, moving forward. And us being a public company now, the ownership is more of a public as well, so it's even more difficult. In terms of trying to create innovations and things like that. So there's a lot of— and of course, because of the fact that we've been losing money for the next 3 to 5 years or whatever, it's been sort of a hampering on us as well on this issue. I haven't been in aviation yet for only 5 months. I'm pretty much still in it. I see a lot of things that I didn't see when I was running an airline. I see a lot of travel industries, how it evolves. And I think I'm always wondering why everybody around the airlines is always making money and airlines don't, and is taking advantage of it. Although, you know, so I think that's where I am at the moment, and I wanted to create something that airlines can benefit from what I'm going to do.

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