AirAsia is not withdrawing from the Philippines market but instead aggressively expanding through its new branding with AirAsia Zest, AirAsia group chief executive officer Tony Fernandes said today.

“I’m a super believer and very bullish about the country. We bought Zest Air and rebrand it into AirAsia Zest. We recorded a day of sales yesterday, with the new branding,” he told a press conference after addressing a plenary session on the final day of the two-day 4th Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Kuala Lumpur.

NONEFernandes was responding to a question whether the low-cost airline's move to suspend its thrice weekly flights from Kuala Lumpur to Clark Air Base indicated that the budget carrier was withdrawing from the Philippines.

Fernandes said: "In fact, there will be more flights to the Philippines via AirAsia and AirAsia Zest.

“We don’t want to spread ourselves too thin. Rather than having two bases, we temporarily moved from Clark and our focus is now in Manila,” he said.

Updating on Malaysia’s operations, Fernandes said the group would have its best ever quarter in the fourth quarter.

“Very load active, yield passive. Analysts talk about yield so much, but we care about revenue per seat. We will continue to grow and increase market share despite competition and be very profitable.

“It’s hard to compete with us. I always said in 12 years of press conferences, lowest cost will always win. We are 100 percent low-cost,” he said.

Fernandes said the group was looking forward for KLIA2 as it would grow its business more.

He also said AirAsia Thailand was doing superbly well and going to earn more than Malaysia.

“Indonesia is doing fantastic. We're small boys but we’re catching up very, very fast. Our domestic market share grew from two per cent to seven percent. We’re number one in the international market,” Fernandes said, adding that AirAsia Indonesia was adding 10 planes this year and additional six planes next year.

Japanese venture a ‘disaster’

Asked on when AirAsia India would start operations, Fernandes said: “I would anticipate maybe April or May next year but I don’t really know. I know when we go in, it would be great and change Indian aviation forever.”

                    

He said that it was not about when to start but to start right as "there is a lot of things the group is trying to change in India.

“No point going there and being a disaster,” he said.

Citing as an example of its earlier Japan ventures as a “disaster” because its partner did not understand what the group wanted, Fernandes said he was not going to make the same mistake again.

As for Japan, he said, the group would re-enter the market in “not too distant future”.

“Things are looking good. We’re now choosing which financial partner to work with,” he said.

Asked whether the group would fly back to London, Fernandes said there was a huge demand for AirAsia X to reintroduce the London route.

“We got to be in Europe. There’s huge demand for us to fly to London and maybe somewhere else in southern Europe. It’s a very important strategic step.     

“As a director of AirAsia X, I’m putting a lot of pressure on them to restart London. Azran (Azran Osman-Rani, chief executive officer of AirAsia X) will have to find a way,” he added.

    

- Bernama