Singapore Airlines to focus on Asia after Virgin Divestment

: Singapore Airlines’ (SIA) sale of its 49% stake in Virgin Atlantic will allow the cash-rich Asian carrier to focus resources on its fast-growing regional market, analysts said Wednesday.
The Singapore carrier’s tie-up with British billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic never really took off since the alliance began 12 years ago when the stake was bought for £600 million ($966.5 million).
SIA on Tuesday said it will sell the stake to Delta Air Lines of the United States for $360 million in cash in a deal to be completed next year.
SIA said it “had been evaluating strategic options for the stake for some time, as the investment has not performed to expectations and the synergies the parties originally hoped for have not materialised.”
Analysts said SIA, consistently one of the world’s most profitable airlines, had little say in how Virgin Atlantic was run by the flamboyant Branson, and the sale allows it to exit an underperforming investment in the troubled European market.
“SIA can now focus on investments in the Asia Pacific region,” Brendan Sobie, a Singapore-based analyst with industry consultancy Centre for Aviation, told the news agency.
Sobie said it made more sense for Delta to have a strategic stake in Virgin Atlantic as there are more synergies in their trans-Atlantic network.
Jason Hughes, an analyst with IG Markets Singapore, said that despite the higher acquisition price paid by SIA, the $360 million “will go down as a profit, as losses had already been accounted for in previous years”.
SIA shares closed 1.12% higher at Sg$10.87 as investors cheered the divestment.
Malaysian bank CIMB said in a note that the sale would give SIA a “short-term boost” but urged investors to focus on the long-term challenges posed by Middle Eastern carriers and budget airlines.
Shukor Yusof, an aviation analyst with Standard & Poor’s Equity Research, said SIA can use the extra cash to “redefine its business strategy on top of beefing up its regional subsidiaries”.
“It’s also good to exit out of Europe because the market conditions there are quite atrocious,” he told the news agency.
Shukor said conflicting management styles with Branson was one of the chief reasons why the alliance failed to prosper beyond a code-sharing agreement.
“Branson remained the controlling shareholder and he called the shots,” he said.
Virgin Atlantic also did not have enough slots at London’s high-traffic Heathrow airport for SIA to latch on in its bid to gain a share of the lucrative trans-Atlantic route to New York, Shukor added.
Analysts said SIA’s decision to buy the stake in Virgin Atlantic in March 2000 was a good move at the time because Asia was just emerging from the 1997-1998 financial crisis.
But the centre of global economic power has since shifted to Asia, sparking a travel boom in the region.
Passenger traffic in the Asia Pacific is forecast to account for 33% of the global market in 2016, up from 29% in 2011, according to trade body International Air Transport Association (IATA).
“This makes the region the largest regional market for air transport, ahead of North America and Europe which each represent 21%,” IATA said in a statement on their latest industry forecast.
SIA has been investing both in the premium travel segment, where it faces competition from Middle East carriers, and in the low-cost market where it is challenged by budget airlines.
SIA in June launched a long-haul budget wing called Scoot while maintaining a substantial stake in low-fare carrier Tiger Airways. It also operates a regional wing, SilkAir.
SIA and Scoot in October announced orders for 45 Airbus and Boeing aircraft. The orders came after SilkAir in August said it would buy 54 new Boeing planes with an option to buy a further 14 aircraft. AFP

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Singapore Airlines to focus on Asia after Virgin divestment Livemint Tweet. First Published: Wed, Dec 12 2012. 05 09 PM IST. Singapore Airlines has been investing both in the premium travel segment, where it faces competition from Middle East carriers, and in the low-cost market where it is challenged by budgetairlines. See all stories on this topic » Livemint

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Canada would be Near-Recession soon ?

Canada faces Near-Recession if U.S. Plunges over ‘cliff,’ Carney warns

The stakes are high for Canada as the U.S. hurtles toward the so-called “fiscal cliff” deadline, Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney says, including the threat of an economic stall in this country.

Canada would be dragged close to another recession if U.S. President Barack Obama and Congress can’t strike a deal to avoid steep tax hikes and spending cuts set for Jan. 1, Mr. Carney warned Tuesday in an interview with The Globe and Mail.

ECONOMY

And yet if the two sides strike a deal, the Canadian economy could be in for a New Year’s bounce as consumers and businesses make up for lost time and resume spending, he said. “It’s our view that if the Americans go over the cliff, that that economy will be in recession with material knock-on effects for Canada,” Mr. Carney said, speaking before a speech to financial analysts in Toronto.

The “fiscal cliff” is the most “acute risk” facing Canada, he said. The problem is “eminently solvable,” but a deal could go down to the wire, he added. A successful resolution would be good for the Canadian economy, which has stalled alongside the U.S. in recent months, he said.

“The underlying U.S. economy is more firmly grounded and making more progress. So that if this could be resolved, truly resolved with a medium-term plan, that would be quite positive for the Canadian economy,” he said, adding that in the United States “the financial system is in better shape, the household system has made a lot of progress, the housing market is turning.”

He pointed out that U.S. corporations are “holding back” as the debate drags on. “So you take that away and you have a series of positives,” he said.

On Tuesday, the U.S. fiscal debate continued to drag on, with talks deadlocked even as Mr. Obama and the House Republicans both floated new proposals.

The Bank of Canada’s base-case scenario is that the U.S. economy will take a 1.5-percentage-point hit to gross domestic product in 2013 and 2014 from tax hikes and spending cuts, according to the bank’s semi-annual review of financial risks released last week.

In a conference room with windows overlooking sprouting condominium towers, Mr. Carney told The Globe that he sees some positive signs that the measures taken to slow the growth of household debt and Canada’s booming housing market are having an effect.

Stressing that he didn’t want to “overplay” the situation, he pointed to “somewhat encouraging signs in terms of the slowing of the pace of the growth of household debt, adjustment of housing starts more towards the level of demographic demand” and “some adjustment in the resale market.”

In his speech, Mr. Carney pointed out that borrowers are starting to respond to the bank’s signal that higher rates are likely coming. Canadians are adding to their record debt levels at a slower pace and they’re moving out of variable-rate mortgages and into less risky fixed-rate loans.

“We have seen the pace of household debt accumulation slow, as hoped for, as intended,” Mr. Carney told reporters after his speech. “We’ll see if that persists.”

The share of new fixed-rate mortgages has almost doubled to 90 per cent this year as homeowners move out of variable-rate loans to lock in today’s relatively low rates before they go up, he said.

Last week, the bank warned that Canadians are still borrowing at a faster pace than their disposable income, making them more vulnerable if they lose their jobs or home prices tumble. The ratio of household debt to gross domestic product now stands at a record high 163 per cent, up from 161.5 per cent in June.

In his speech, Mr. Carney said the Bank of Canada’s interest rate guidance is never an iron-clad “promise” and it will only signal the exact timing of monetary decisions in rare and exceptional circumstances. In “normal” times, he said the central bank must always adapt to changing economic conditions. The bank’s current “guidance” is for “some modest withdrawal” of its current low target rate, which has been stuck at 1 per cent since September, 2010, to help the economy recover from the recession.

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Cloud Computing the ‘Future of the Future

At the National ICT Business & Innovation Symposium recently, Jeremy Geelan, president of 21st Century Internet Group Inc concluded his keynote address by saying, “Cloud computing allows you to create and if you can create, you can be what’s next.” 

 

The lecture, entitled The New Cloud Enabled World, aimed to illustrate the many benefits of cloud computing. Geelan, who is also the conference chair of the International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, refers to himself as a “domain expert on the future of the future” ie The Cloud. 

 

Cloud computing is the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage and process data rather than a local server or a personal computer.

 

When he rhetorically asked the audience, “Why move to cloud?” his answers included these reasons: unlimited processing and storage, elasticity, maximised revenue, reduced cost, expedited time and the ability to do more projects. 

 

To support his claims, Geelan provided some statistics on Internet usage. According to Geelan, in the early days of the Internet during the 1990s, there were approximately ten million users. Now, the Internet has more than one billion users, he said. This growth is also visible by looking at Web sites: a little over a decade ago there were one million Web sites—a number which has now leaped to 100 million. The number of Internet connected devices now stands at five billion and

 

Geelan believes that estimate is conservative. As further evidence, Geelan pointed out that the file-hosting site Dropbox, founded only in 2007, had 100 million users with one billion files saved every two hours. 

 

One of the possibilities Geelan posed to the audience was the problem solving power of using cloud: “If every car in T&T had an IP address it might be very easy to figure out why traffic is such a problem,” he suggested.

 

The cloud-enabled concept car, Evos, revealed by US motor company Ford earlier this year can track driver preferences, work schedules, music and weather information and it also allows for coal data to be shared through vehicle-to-vehicle communication. 

 

While Geelan offered examples of many businesses and organisations that were 100 per cent cloud operated such as Amazon, Coca Cola, Maersk and even the US Central Intelligence Agency, Guardian technology columnist Mark

Lyndersay believes the road to full cloud dependency is still far reaching, particularly in T&T. “Now that enterprise is looking into the cloud model for more everyday tasks, there are a number of issues that are coming to the forefront. Data security, broadband accessibility and reliability, and depth of Internet penetration become critical factors in doing business this way, which is quite a conceptual jump from individuals making use of services on the web,” he said via e-mail. 

 

“There’s a huge conceptual jump between having a Facebook page and running your business off a cloud based service and that’s where the evangelising of cloud computing solutions has become critical.” 

 

Apart from security risks, Lyndersay also pointed out that cloud computing was not exactly a new phenomenon. “The real challenge that cloud computing proponents face is that they aren’t really introducing a new product. The concept of cloud computing has been growing around us for several years now, long before it was formalised as a name and a decade’s worth of young people and reasonably experienced web users have come to expect data held on servers on the Internet as part of the overall computing experience.” 

 

Geelan proffered that cloud computing was an example of the “democratisation of IT” making access to services, learning and even funding easier, particularly for those living in T&T’s rural areas. He said T&T may be ahead of the curve because business technology is now becoming social technology and the high saturation of smart phones in T&T could be the turning point. 

 

However, Lyndersay was not convinced that the proliferation of smart phones and other mobile Internet connected devices was a sure sign of progress. “I’m not sure that it’s true to describe T&T as being ahead of many countries in the saturation of smart phones. Such devices only get their intelligence with a broadband connection and that’s still quite far from reaching saturation point,” he said.

 

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage and process data rather than a local server or a personal computer. The name comes from the use of a cloud shaped symbol used to represent the complex infrastructure it contains in system diagrams. Cloud computing entrusts remote services with a user’s data, software and computation. Consumers access cloud based applications through a Web browser or a light-weight desktop or mobile application while the business software and user’s data are stored on servers at a remote location. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and economies of scale similar to a utility, like electricity, over a network.

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