Malaysia soon dropped by the government?

Despite a good turnaround Malaysia continues to lose money and the Malaysian government is considering ending its national airline.

Malaysia has always been an excellent airline and our latest flights with her show it but the impact of the successive disappearances of MH17 and MH370 is still not digested. The airline has restructured and tried everything to survive the decline in passenger numbers, but the impact is not yet visible and the financial statements remain in the red.

It must be said that not everything has always been clear in its strategy: stopping the A380, using the superjumbo for charter flights, reinstating the B747 in the fleet to finally not use them … Long haul remains an issue.

As a result, the Malaysian government is no longer willing to continue to absorb the losses. Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad recently stated that a decision had to be taken quickly regarding the airline: refinance it, sell it or simply stop it.

We can understand the concerns of the State because Malaysia is a private airline in appearance only: the State has in fact sold it to its sovereign wealth fund. This basically means that they simply changed the pocket they were taking the money from.

In any case, and we will have the opportunity to talk about this again in the context of what is happening for example at Air France-KLM the subject is indeed of whether it is in a country’s interest to support a national airline in some way with public funds. In my opinion, the State will put money back into the airline to keep it alive, but the mere fact that the question is being raised, that the government is mentioning it publicly, which would not have happened 10 or 20 years ago, shows that the answer is no longer as obvious as it once was.

 

 

Photo : Malaysia Airlines by Danial Abdullah via Shutterstock

Bertrand Duperrin
Bertrand Duperrinhttp://www.duperrin.com
Compulsive traveler, present in the French #avgeek community since the late 2000s and passionate about (long) travel since his youth, Bertrand Duperrin co-founded Travel Guys with Olivier Delestre in March 2015.
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