Philippine Airlines announced on Tuesday it had ordered 54 Airbus aircraft with a list price of $7 billion, and planned to buy dozens more planes in a spectacular move to rejuvenate Asia's oldest carrier.
"The orders we are placing with Airbus will play a key role in revitalising PAL and growing trade and tourism in this country," PAL chairman Lucio Tan said in a statement.
In a separate statement Airbus said the "firm orders" were for 34 single-aisle A321 ceo planes, 10 of the newer-model A321 neo models and 10 long-haul A330-300s, and delivery would start next year.
PAL said the orders had a list price of $7 billion dollars.
PAL president Ramon Ang told reporters at a press conference announcing the deal that the carrier intended to buy 100 new aircraft in total.
"Our intention is to buy up to 100 aircraft, 26 of that will be long range, wide body," Ang told reporters, adding all the planes would be bought and none leased.
The announcement comes after San Miguel, one of the Philippines' biggest conglomerates, bought a 49-per cent stake in the loss-making carrier for $500 million in April, and took over management.
Ang is president of San Miguel although billionaire Tan, an ethnic Chinese tycoon who is the country's second-wealthiest man, remains PAL's controlling shareholder.
PAL, which began flying in 1941, reported a net loss of $33.5 million in the three months to December, reversing a profit of $15.1 million from the same period the previous year.
It had said the losses were mainly due to soaring fuel costs, and added that it was looking for fresh money to upgrade its fleet.
However the airline's reputation had also declined, with passengers complaining of old planes, limited flight options and poor service.
PAL has had to watch its status as the nation's top carrier slide in recent years, giving up the mantle to low-cost rival Cebu Pacific.
PAL was also forced to cut hundreds of flights in September last year after a day-long wildcat strike by ground crew who were protesting the outsourcing of 2,600 catering, airport services and call centre reservation jobs.
It took the airline more than a month to cut the flight backlog, however Tan won the battle against the determined unions to outsource the jobs and cut costs.
PAL's current fleet is made up of 39 aircraft that fly to 31 foreign cities and destinations. Thirty-one of those are Airbus planes. The other eight are Boeing aircraft.
The US Republican and Democratic conventions have traditionally targeted television viewers above all - but this year's will see an unprecedented effort to reach voters via social media.
In the last presidential election four years ago, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms were not yet the ubiquitous force they are now - even if Barack Obama was among the first to use online tools in a major way for electoral ends.
It was arguably not until the US mid-term elections in 2010 that social media, including YouTube and Flickr, really took off as key tools in the politicians' communications armory.
The Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida and the Democratic gathering in Charlotte, North Caroline next month, confirm the trend, with huge teams of staff members dedicated to reaching voters online.
"Wherever you live, whatever device you use, we want you to engage as an active participant in this convention," the convention's chief executive William Harris said last week.
"This convention is about every American's future, and everyone has a stake in it so we created a 'Convention without Walls' to make this the most open and accessible event in history."
In addition to the inevitable Twitter and Facebook pages, both parties have set up stall on YouTube, photo sharing sites Flickr and Pinterest, and the Google + and Foursquare networks, as well as an array of smartphone applications.
In Tampa, a Google Media Lounge created in partnership with the search giant, "will serve as command headquarters for monitoring, engaging and building online community to amplify convention messages," its website said.
An online Conversation Room will also allow speakers to send messages and photos on Twitter and Facebook, or give interviews by Skype, before or after they actually address the convention.
The Democratic National Convention - whose Facebook page had three times as many "likes" as its Republican equivalent on Friday - has organized a "Tweetup" in the run-up to the Obama party's talkfest.
It has given a behind-the-scenes look to a group of volunteers at the planning and construction of the convention, inviting them to share their thoughts and photos, online ahead of the Sept 4-6 convention.
The Democratic gathering's chief executive, Steve Kerrigan, said - in a video released on YouTube, naturally - that the Charlotte gathering would be "the most open and accessible one in history".
Within a few years, Amazon.com's creative destruction of both traditional book publishing and retailing may be footnotes to the company's larger and more secretive goal: giving anyone on the planet access to an almost unimaginable amount of computing power.
Every day, a start-up called the Climate Corporation performs over 10,000 simulations of the next two years' weather for more than one million locations in the United States. It then combines that with data on root structure and soil porosity to write crop insurance for thousands of farmers.
Another start-up, called Cue, scans up to 500 million e-mails, Facebook updates and corporate documents to create a service that can outline the biography of a given person you meet, warn you to be home to receive a package or text a lunch guest that you are running late.
Each of these start-ups carries out computing tasks that a decade ago would have been impossible without a major investment in computers. Both of these companies, however, own little besides a few desktop computers. They and thousands of other companies now rent data storage and computer server time from Amazon, through its Amazon Web Services division, for what they say is a fraction of the cost of owning and running their own computers.
"I have 10 engineers, but without A.W.S. I guarantee I'd need 60," said Daniel Gross, Cue's 20-year-old co-founder. "It just gets cheaper, and cheaper, and cheaper." He figures Cue spends something under $100,000 a month with Amazon but would spend "probably $2 million to do it ourselves, without the speed and flexibility."
He conceded that "I don't even know what the ballpark number for a server is - for me, it would be like knowing what the price of a sword is."
Cloud computing has been around for years, but it is now powering all kinds of new businesses around the globe, quickly and with less capital.
Instagram, a 12-person photo-sharing company that was sold to Facebook for an estimated $1 billion just 19 months after it opened, skipped the expenses and bother of setting up its own computer servers.
EdX, a global online education program from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, had over 120,000 students taking a single class together on A.W.S. Over 185 United States government agencies run some part of their services on A.W.S. Millions of people in Africa shop for cars online, using cheap smartphones connected to A.W.S. servers located in California and Ireland.
"We are on a shift that is as momentous and as fundamental as the shift to the electrical grid," said Andrew R. Jassy, the head of A.W.S. "It's happening a lot faster than any of us thought."
He started A.W.S. in 2006 with about three dozen employees. Amazon won't say how many people now work at A.W.S., but the company's Web site currently lists over 600 job openings.
Amazon's efforts are just the start of a global competition among computing giants. In June, Google fully introduced a service similar to A.W.S. Microsoft is also in the business with its offering, Windows Azure.
If only for competitive reasons, Amazon does not say much about A.W.S. However, it is estimated to bring in about $1 billion to Amazon. Its three giant computer regional centers in the United States, in Virginia, Oregon and California, each consist of multiple buildings with thousands of servers.
There are others in Japan, Ireland, Singapore and Brazil. And the pace of its expansion has quickened. It opened four of those regions in 2011 and is believed to be building a similar number now. Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, is interested in setting up cloud-computing installations for other governments.
According to an executive with knowledge of Amazon's operation who was not authorized to speak publicly, just one of the 10 data centers in Amazon's Eastern United States region has more servers dedicated to cloud computing than does Rackspace, a public cloud company serving 180,000 businesses with more than 80,000 servers.
Eventually, however, Mr. Jassy said, "we believe at the highest level that A.W.S. can be at least as big as our other businesses." Amazon recorded nearly $50 billion in revenue last year. Mr. Jassy thinks A.W.S. is probably less than 10 percent of its eventual size.
The lower cost of computing, along with overnight deployment of machines, drives the business. Germany's Spiegel TV paid A.W.S. to make digital copies of 20,000 programs. It cost less than Spiegel would have paid for the electricity powering its own servers.
GoodData, based in San Francisco, analyzes data from 6,000 companies on A.W.S. to find things like sales leads. "Before, each company needed at least five people to do this work," said Roman Stanek, GoodData's chief executive. "That is 30,000 people. I do it with 180. I don't know what all those other people will do now, but this isn't work they can do anymore. It's a winner-takes-all consolidation."
All that data running through Amazon's cloud also has value. People leave bits of data about themselves that others then analyze. At any given time on A.W.S., there are about one million uses of a powerful database, called Elastic MapReduce, that is used to make predictions. Some suggest a new movie or video game to play, while others log behavior for advertising, credit history or suggestions about whom to date. (Companies have to permit their data to be analyzed, and Amazon says it applies the same security standards it uses on its retail site.)
The efficiency of this hyper-aware environment is already remaking jobs for many and will most likely dislocate more. "You can now test a product against millions of users for just a few thousand dollars, or start a company with just one or two people," said Graham Spencer, a partner at Google Ventures, which invests in data-heavy start-ups that rely on such cheap computing. "It's a huge change for Silicon Valley."
That vision is in line with the way Mr. Bezos sees A.W.S., say executives who have worked with him. "Jeff thinks on a planetary level," said David Risher, a former Amazon senior executive who now heads a charity called Worldreader, which uses A.W.S. to download books to thousands of computers in Africa. "A.W.S. is an opportunity, as a business. But it is also a philosophy of enabling other people to build big systems. That is how Amazon will make a dent in the universe."
Active in cloud, Amazon reshapes computing NDTV Within a few years, Amazon.com's creative destruction of both traditional book publishing and retailing may be footnotes to the company's larger and more secretive goal: giving anyone on the planet access to an almost unimaginable amount of computing... See all stories on this topic »
Does the US understand cloud computing? ZDNet The average American consumer doesn't understand what cloud computing is or how it works, according to a national survey. The survey, undertaken by Wakefield Research and commissioned by cloud-technology firm Citrix, showed that many U.S. ... See all stories on this topic »
The civil aviation ministry has approved a strategic alliance between Jet Airways (India) Ltd, the country’s largest airline by passengers carried, and Deutsche Lufthansa AG that will enable them to sell seats across each other’s networks, in the process pushing state-owned Air India deeper into the red.
The blanket approval for the code-sharing arrangement between Jet and the German airline could be a step towards the Indian carrier joining Star Alliance, the world’s largest airline network.
Code sharing is an agreement between two airlines that allows each to book seats on the other’s flights as it would on its own.
Teaming up: Jet Airways wants to cover almost the entire Lufthansa network in Europe and North America, and other routes. In return, Lufthansa will be able to book seats on Jet’s domestic flights. Photo: Hindustan Times
Typically, the arrangement is restricted to a few select sectors, but Jet sought approval to cover almost the entire Lufthansa network in Europe and North America, and other routes. In return, Lufthansa will be able to book seats on Jet’s domestic flights.
“This will help them expand their market. We have granted them in-principle approval for it this week,” said a aviation ministry official, who declined to be named.
Jet did not reply to an email and phone calls seeking comment. Lufthansa declined to comment.
Lufthansa had mentored Air India to join Star Alliance, which has since denied entry to the government-owned carrier on grounds that it hadn’t met some membership conditions, Mint reported on 2 August. Air India had rejected these claims.
Jet Airways chairman Naresh Goyal and Star Alliance’s chief executive officer Mark Schwab had met earlier this year to discuss plans for Jet to join the network; Jet applied to the aviation ministry on 16 July seeking approval to join the club, which would make it the partner of choice for other members of the alliance flying to India.
Teaming up with Lufthansa could ease Jet’s entry into Star Alliance.
The aviation ministry, as per standard protocol, sought Air India’s views on Jet Airways’ request to co-opt Lufthansa. Air India “strongly opposed” the move, an official at the flag carrier said on condition of anonymity.
“It’s miserable to see what is being done,” the Air India official said.
Air India, in an estimate to the ministry, said it risked losing Rs. 92 crore annually on just one single route—Mumbai-Munich—as a result of the code sharing between Jet Airways and Lufthansa. The approval covers several dozen more routes.
Civil aviation minister Ajit Singh told Parliament last week that Air India’s loss on international routes had reached Rs. 1,700 crore in the three years from 2009-10.
Steve Forte, a former Jet Airways chief executive officer, said a blanket code sharing arrangement could mean Jet was preparing to sell a stake to a foreign airline when the Indian government changes rules to allow it. At present, Indian rules permit foreign investment of up to 49% in domestic carriers, provided the investor isn’t an airline.
“Perhaps Jet is getting ready for foreign participation, particularly in view of Goyal’s reversal on his previous position of being against it,” Forte said adding, “Whatever the reason, both airlines can advertise a larger network and it should be somewhat detrimental to Air India.”
Jet will be able to attract more passengers to its domestic network if it decides to fly to European points such as Munich and Frankfurt from places such as Hyderabad and Bangalore and could even relocate its existing European hub from Brussels to the Lufthansa-fed Munich or Frankfurt, said a foreign airline executive who asked not to be identified.
For Lufthansa, the code sharing means taking on Emirates, this executive said.
“You have to look at who Lufthansa fears...who is threatening to eat their lunch? The answer is, of course, the Middle-Eastern carriers,” this executive said, adding that Lufthansa has realized that it can’t serve all the destinations that Emirates serves profitably.
The executive explained that the German airlines flights to Hyderabad and Kolkata have failed. Emirates, Etihad, Qatar Airways and Turkish Airlines together fly to 85 cities in Europe, this person explained. “That is obviously very unsettling for a large European carrier.”
Demand for aviation staff to surge in SE Asia AsiaOne ... two decades. Some 185,000 new commercial airline pilots and 243,500 new technicians are expected to be needed in the Asia-Pacific from now to 2030. The region's aviation industry is forecast to have a staggering market value of S$1.7 trillion by then. See all stories on this topic »
