Chairman of Qantas Airways, Leigh Clifford, has told the airline's annual general meeting in Adelaide that he can't say when dividends will return because the airlines has US$17 billion of aircraft on order and a credit rating to safeguard.
Any future dividend payments, he said, would be a judgment call, considered against the airline's capital needs. Clifford denied the airline had a cash flow problem.
Credit rating is "very, very important" he said, when an airline has a US$17 billion acquisition program.
"So we have got to be very conscious of our credit rating because a number of those planes, probably the vast majority of them, will be financed by debt," he said. "It is a constant balance. Just when you think we are out past a shore break in the airline industry, along comes a volcano in Iceland and knocks you towards the boundary, so we have always got to be alert for that.