Originally Posted by
GUWonder
Any such corporate "pledge" would be all about the new US Admin. Such things are meant to make the POTUS happy by giving him an example of protecting US companies' US workers from foreign competition. If the current POTUS tweets about this, that will reveal a lot.
It's not a corporate "pledge".
This is exactly what Hogan said:
“We are not flying into any further points in the U.S.A.,” Etihad Aviation Group Chief Executive Officer James Hogan said Wednesday in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “We are very comfortable with our American network.”
I am not sure that an outgoing CEO could give a "corporate pledge" anyway, as the succeeding team is likely to have different ideas...so any "pledge" - not that there was one - could not be seen as having any effect after the departure of the CEO that gave it.
He also said that he stood by his investment strategy, but you can be sure that the airline will seek to exit as many of these as possible as soon as possible after he has gone.
Besides - this shouldn't have come as news.
Originally Posted by
CAPA
For the first time in over a decade, a Gulf superconnector airline will reduce its annual capacity. Etihad is forecast to cut ASKs by 4% in 2017. Emirates and Qatar Airways will have their slowest growth expansion in a decade, but in terms of net capacity addition 2017's production increase is the slowest in about five years.
Etihad is contracting in all regions except Western Europe and Australia in 2017. The largest cuts will be in South America, North America and Southeast Asia, although this does not necessarily correlate to regional profitability. Despite the reduction Etihad's frequencies will be up 1% in 2017, mostly in Western Europe and South Asia.
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It probably suits the airline to have people think "oh, they are pausing their growth because of Trump" - but there is no reason to think this is the main reason.
Qatar announced service to Las Vegas after the election, and confirmed the date a few weeks ago.
Emirates announced service to Newark - via Athens, Greece 2 weeks ago.
The real reason behind Etihad's pause has far more to do with their current financial problems.
Originally Posted by
GUWonder
But EY is under pressure too from the economics of the business and its "investments" that didn't work out so well.
Indeed. Etihad's biggest problem right now is to solve the airberlin and Alitalia messes, which have been draining resources (losing money and tying up staff). They hope that they have managed to stem the losses at airberlin, thanks to the arrangement with Lufthansa and TUI, which was recently cleared by the Bundeskartellamt but which may face further scrutiny from European regulators. Alitalia is reportedly losing more than €500,000 a day and they urgently need to solve that problem.
The fact that their own business is in trouble -
with restructuring, job cuts, network shrinkage and the CEO and CFO leaving the company means that there are - as shown above - no immediate plans for growth.