Qantas Life Cycle

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.

Qantas is in the post maturity stage and are trying to renew in the business life cycle. These are shown by the company's profits in the last few years and the plans that have been set out for Qantas future.

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.

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).

Management practices at Qantas are more flexible and adapted to suit challenges in society such as the reaction to terrorism, the introduction of viral disease and the ever changing market and customer requirements.

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.

Qantas’ main weaknesses come from the high risk nature of airlines (possibility of crashes and large scale incidents), the complexity of the aircraft they buy which could lead to costs of re-training pilots to fly that particular aircraft and may lead to higher labour and the recent string of incidents have undoubtedly hindered Qantas’ image. One of the most recent incidents occurred while a reasonably new Qantas A380 was flying from Singapore to Sydney when it experienced engine and hydraulic problems forcing it to hastily turn back and make an emergency landing in Singapore. This

Qantas is one of the major companies in Australia, and also is an important part of the airline global industry. However, this report suggest that, it is not an appropriate time to invest in this company, because the company is going through financial

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

These main business objectives help the airline to focus on deliver quality services of the customers. Qantas main business is passengers transports and it is the world’s second oldest airlines. Qantas group operates approx 5600 flights in a weak in 59 cities of regional areas. Internationally, the group operates around 970 flights (Qantas-630 and Jetstar-340) in 44 counties 182 destinations. Moreover, through operations the group focused on five key elements that are right aircraft or right

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.

This report’s main purpose is to provide an overall analysis of the performance of Qantas Airlines Limited which despite being Australia’s largest local and international airline, QANTAS has been struggling with financial matters since 2011 due to specific adjustments in the guidelines of accounting such as the assets impairment. It has also forged an alliance with the Emirates Airlines which is based in the United Arab Emirates. There has been a notable concentration on the reduction of the size of its fleet and number of jobs to mitigate the losses it suffered in 2004.

Through s Porters Five Forces analysis (Figure 1 – Appendices) the greatest threat for Qantas is the rivalry. Qantas is taking advantage of this opportunity as through the alliance it creates greater certainty for the shareholders while also being able to increase its numbers in international routes to 33 one-stop destinations in Europe in addition to 31 one-stop destinations in the Middle East and North Africa (Ryan, 2012). Additionally, as competition was putting pressure on the market while Qantas was restricted by financial reasons, this alliance came as a great opportunity. Furthermore, from 31st of March Qantas frequent flier point users were able to book Emirates flights while the customers’ high status with Qantas was recognized at Emirates as well. Lastly, on European, Asian and African destinations Qantas mirrored Emirates baggage policies (from 20kg to 30kg) (Panaus Travel, 2013).