Airline Industry And Competitive Environment

On October 22nd, 2001, the Industrial dispute between QANTAS and its employees was initiated with the offering of a new Enterprise Bargaining Agreement. This proposed an 18-month wage freeze for employees plus a sliding scale profit share scheme. Ten out of twelve unions under QANTAS accepted the terms of the agreement, barring the unions of manufacturing employees (AWU and AMWU). They were holding out for a 4-6% pay rise. On the 8th May 2002, some ten months later, the dispute was resolved when QANTAS agreed to an across the board 6% pay increase. This essay provides an in-depth analysis into the dispute, including causes, the resolution process, the role of stakeholders, and costs and benefits for all concerned.

This report largely focuses on constructing a situational analysis of Qantas Airlines. An organisations situational analysis refers to an analysis that consists of ascertaining the key factors that will be used as a basis for development of marketing strategy. (Elliot 2014). Situational analysis consists of the environment analysis (both internal and external environment), competitor’s analysis and finally the swot analysis.

The main focus of this report is to identify the legal classification, the characteristics, the life cycle stage of Qantas and one internal and external stakeholder that is affected by the activates of Qantas. The legal classification describes that Qantas is a public company and has changed its legal classification in the growth and maturity stages of the business life cycle. The characteristics of Qantas talks about the company's industrial classification and sector classification. The business life cycle is explained and gives reason why Qantas is in the renewal stage of post maturity. There is also description of one internal and external

1) Qantas Airways Limited is the national airline of Australia, it is also the largest airline in Australia. The Qantas Group’s principal business is providing domestic and international air transport services for passengers. Additionally, Qantas owns several subsidiary companies such as Jetstar and QantasLink that also operates flights to domestic and international locations, and Q Catering, a premium full service flight caterer.

The Airline industry is a large and constantly growing industry. It facilitates economic growth, international investment and world trade and is therefore central to other industries as well for globalisation. There are various forces which lead to globalisation in airline industry. Key drivers of change are forces likely to affect the structure of an industry; sector or market. (1).

Qantas is Australia’s largest domestic and international airline. Although Qantas is primarily a passenger airline, air freight is also an integral part of its core business. Other Qantas operations include catering, tourism and E-commerce devoted to transport and travel. In order to have an effective business and operations process, a company, like Qantas must be aware of the influences that can affect it. By being aware of the influences it enables the business to make decision and choices that can get the most out of each influence, by doing this it can assist the business in its endeavours for success.

Rivalry among industry competitors has caused attention to be focused on tariff levels. Airfare prices were at an all time low in 2009. This suggested a strong competitive rivalry based on price differentiation. This price differentiation will cause a dramatic loss in revenue if these prices continue to drop and this would lead to a reduced competitiveness. In an effort to safeguard revenue and reduce expenditure, Qantas has developed a strategy to deal with a change in the external competitive environment. .

Qantas’ financial performance has been very successful in recent years with the business recovering strongly from GFC and a large decrease in revenue to ear 377 million in 2010. The effective financial performance has been the result of effective profitability, liquidity, efficiency, return on capital, good solvency and growth including the establishment of a new airline (jet star).

Established in 1920, Qantas is the world's 11th largest airline and the 2nd oldest. It was founded in the Queensland outback as the Queensland and Northern territory Aerial Service (QANTAS) Limited, by pioneer aviators Hudson Fysh, Paul McGinness and Fergus McMaster. Qantas was a former government owned business; it did not view profits or efficiency as its prime goal. In 1993 a 25% stake was sold to British Airways. Qantas was privatised in 1995 and has had to adopt management practices to overcome both internal and external influences and had to change its narrow-minded culture. Although Qantas is primarily a passenger airline, air freight is also an integral part of its core business. Other Qantas

By outsourcing, Qantas is able to significantly reduce costs and maintain it’s competitive advantage. However this advantage also has a draw back, hundreds of engineers have also been cut from their jobs and have had their jobs given to people overseas. This puts a bad reputation on the name of the business as an Australian business will cut jobs from Australian workers and supple foreign workers with jobs. Families and friends of these workers may feel resentment towards Qantas and choose to travel with another airline instead resulting in a loss of customers. This strategy has been effective in reducing cost but has resulted in a reduction of quality and safety and led to a decreased business reputation resulting in a loss of customers and stakeholders.

Flight Centre describes itself as a global discount flight specialist. Taking into consideration the relative size of the Australian and international operations as well as the availability of information on global environment and competitive factors, for this analysis, it is more appropriate to consider the Flight Centre’s industry environment as “The Australian international and domestic airline

Qantas is established in the Queensland outback in 1920 and after that it has become biggest domestic and international airline and strong brand in the Australia. It is enrolled as the Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Limited (QANTAS) and the group two airlines brands are Qantas and Jetstar those provides transportation services of the customers. Qantas created its strong brand reputation through deliver safe and secure services, focus on customer services, maintain reliability of operations and focus on maintenance, engineering and technology (Qantas Airways Limited, 2014). Quanta main business aims or objectives are:

In 2011, Qantas suffered complications from inside and outside the brand. Several job cuts and structural changes, their focus on returns to stock holders and not its responsibilities to the share - holders all added to their external issues. The external issues that rose were the increase of new competitors, changes in consumer decision making, the high demand of customers for lower rates and better quality. Lastly, Australians began their international travels with other international brands. 2016 has proven to be a turnaround year for Qantas relying largely on the lowered prices of oil and the falling Australian currency. Qantas recovered from a $2.8 billion loss in 2014 to a net profit of $688 million within six months. The turnaround has been described as “one of the most remarkable in history”

Launched just 8 years ago, today, the Jetstar Group consists of a network of value-based air carriers that deliver high quality air passenger services for budget-minded travelers across Australia, New Zealand and the Asia Pacific region. Beginning with just 400 employees, the company currently employs more than 7,000 people and carries about 20 million passengers a year. To gain some insights into how the Jetstar Group achieved this impressive growth in such a short amount of time, this paper provides a review of the relevant literature concerning the air passenger industry in general and the business strategy used by the Jetstar Group in particular. A summary of the research and recommendations for this company are provided in the paper's conclusion.

Combined, Qantas along Emirates offer 98 weekly routes between Dubai and Australia. This deal improved Qantas’ profit before tax with an increase of 80/90 million A$ in 2012/2013 while projecting an increase of around 400 million A$ in the financial year 2013/2014 according to an analyst at Macquarie (Joyce, 2013). This alliance surpassed the existing partnership - Etihad Airways/Virgin Australia which covers only 30 European routes (Varley, 2013). Ultimately, the alliance helped divert capital resources from Europe to