Prompted by a trusted senior industry insider, Airline Economics has confirmed from various sources in Japan that SkyMark was awarded “new entrant” slots at Hanada to spur competition with JAL and ANA. To protect against the slots simply being sold on to JAL and ANA or their affiliates, the slot agreements were written with a provision that if a new entrant holding the slots was sold/acquired past a 20% threshold then the incremental slots would be returned for re-allocation to other legitimate “new entrants”. For this reason ANA confirms that it will not consider exceeding 20% ownership of Skymark under any circumstance whatsoever.
So although ANA can solve the A380/Airbus reparations problem for Skymark, it can do little else without exceeding the 20% threshold in terms of the sheer equity amounts we are talking about here. Without question, ANA absorbing A330s from Skymark will have to be well masked, very well masked indeed.
Meanwhile AirAsia continues to have a problematic time of it in 2015 thus far with AirAsia X coming under severe criticism from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission for the way it dealt with passengers after it cut direct flights between Adelaide and Kuala Lumpur in January. Passengers had to rebook with other airlines, or make their own way to Perth or Melbourne to catch AirAsia X flights to Kuala Lumpur. AirAsia X will now have to review claims again and likely issue additional revised compensation to the same. Meanwhile in Thailand we have it under advice from three separate senior sources that AirAsia Thailand is flogging mid-life A320s at $20m to shore-up liquidity/release the assets at speed. Thai AirAsia and Nok are both coming under pressure from Lion Air (Thai Lion) in a significant market price war that will be very interesting to follow.