Air India requested to submit plan to raise domestic share, IndiGo tops market share in Aug-2012
India's Minister of Civil Aviation Ajit Singh requested (18-Sep-2012) Air India submit in a week's time a plan to enhance its share in the domestic passenger market. The detailed plan has to include month-wise targets of market share along with corresponding strategy to achieve these targets for the next 12 months. While noting the share of Air India in the domestic passengers carried by Indian schedule airlines has been maintained at the level of 18.2%, Mr Singh emphasised a number of efforts have to be made by Air India to regain its number one position in terms of market share. He has asked Air India to come out with innovative and customer focused strategies to achieve optimum utilisation of all planes and also maximum utilisation of each plane. The Minister noted Indian domestic carriers handled 39.8 million passengers in the eight months to Aug-2012, a 0.5% year-on-year increase. In Aug-2012, passenger numbers declined 3.7% to 4.4 million, marking the third consecutive month of year-on-year declines as follows:
- Domestic passenger numbers: 4.4 million;
- Air India: 794,000;
- Jet Airways: 816,000;
- JetLite: 285,000;
- IndiGo: 1.2 million;
- SpiceJet: 807,000;
- GoAir: 324,000;
- Kingfisher: 138,000;
- Religare: 1000;
- Domestic market share:
- Air India: 18.2%;
- Jet Airways: 18.7%;
- JetLite: 6.5%;
- IndiGo: 27.6%;
- Spice Jet: 18.5%;
- Go Air: 7.4%;
- Kingfisher: 3.2%. [more - original PR]