The chief executive office of Qantas, Alan Joyce, has again called on the Australian government to relax the cap on foreign ownership. Joyce has warned that Qantas may be left on the sidelines of a consolidating global airline industry due to the restrictive measure that limits foreign ownership of the airline to 49%, ownership by foreign airlines to 35% and foreign ownership by a single investor to 25%. The main problem is that this restriction applies only to Qantas – indeed the rule is referred to as the Qantas Sale Act. Main rival Virgin Australia is not encumbered, which Joyce claims is unfair.
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Qantas 737[/caption]
“I think it’s an eventual thing for some future government to look at if it wants Qantas to be involved in airline consolidation in the region when it occurs but we are not focused on it right now,” said Joyce at a recent conference. “We can never be majority-owned by anyone but Australians, that’s the way the act is structured. So for us it’s never going to be something on the table, but it is on the table for Virgin and they could easily be owned by the Chinese and they are already majority foreign-owned.