Phillipines AirAsia CEO Update

Transcript

Josephine Caneba:The Philippines market, we have a lot of potential to develop because it's still underserved at the moment. The great thing about the market is that there are only 3 players, local players, that are into it. We have Philippine Airlines, Cebu Pacific, and us, Philippines AirAsia. So the growth for Philippine AirAsia is really tremendous when we also look into the network that we can tap into as a group level. The niche that we can carve in What Tony is saying is the interconnectivity between us and the parent company and creating more routes that have not been done before. So we're looking at developing Puerto Princesa and other key hubs that may be Davao or Iloilo, things like that. The only reason that we are reducing the aircraft at the moment is that we have to re-fleet. As you know, we've acquired an airline before that has an existing aircraft at the moment, so we wanted to return that aircraft and have a consistent type of aircraft that the AirAsia Group has. As Tony mentioned in the presentation earlier, low-cost carriers, it's all about efficiency, operational efficiency. So we have newer planes and we have a consistent type of aircraft. We can be more at par and competitive in the market. So when we're done with the refleeting by this year, then maybe next year we're looking at additional aircraft or 3 aircraft per year. We're slowly growing our business portfolio into the Philippines. So focus next year would be international market, China. Our domestic at the moment, we're already strong in Calibo and Puerto Princesa, and we want to develop China China market going into China in the Philippines. As you know, we have a lot of Filipino Chinese into the market, and we have a lot to offer to the Chinese community, to the Chinese coming into. We have beautiful islands that they will definitely enjoy. Right now, we're doing Beijing, Shanghai, Wuxi. We'll have Hangzhou next year. We'll probably have Canton and a lot more other key cities into China, into Philippines. It will be mixed. We have now Manila, Calibo, and maybe later on Puerto Princesa and other areas. We're already doing single AOC at the moment. We are already under Philippine AirAsia. The change of the name will happen quite soon, very, very soon. I've just informed the group that we've gotten the approval, but the final step will probably be announced in a few weeks or so. I mean, you know, if you manage 2 AOCs, which was a big headache for me before, I mean, with just one AOC it's easier, and people— we are able to manage our resources more with just one AOC. We've just met the stockholders last week, and I think the recapitalization will happen quite soon by this year. And next year, I think, will be definitely profitable year. Thank you.

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