CPH-Flyer

Sky News reports that Alex Cruz is in the running to head SK

​https://news.sky.com/story/former-br...e-sas-12266561

I guess the BA forum was happy to see him go. Though it would mean that SK is in for even more penny pinching, though even for Alex Cruz it must be difficult to find service elements to cut.

Nick Art

April Fools was a few days ago... I really hope this is a joke.

SKT-DK

I am a bit torn on this one to be honest - I agree that he did not do much good for BA. However, on one hand Alex Cruz is someone you would bring in to clean up, be tough on unions etc, but on the other that stance might drive the final nail in the coffin on a heavily unionised airline like SK. I do not think they could survive another war like back in 2012 when they literally were minutes from going under.

CPH-Flyer

He may not have done much good for BA passengers, but for BA as a company I think he did pretty well. Despite the service cuts, customers did not run away in great numbers.

Where he might actually be good for SK, he has certainly never shied away from confrontations with staff in order to change structures. He might be the medicine SK needs for more long term viability.

SKT-DK

I tend to agree - my main concern is that his approach would drive the company into strikes that will drain it of money because the unions will think they can fight him, and have no understanding of the fact that they will not win that fight. Result: bye bye SAS. No doubt the clean-up is needed though, in my opinion.

Dover2Golf

Anyone who thinks Cruz was good for BA should take a look at the outstanding cases in court. They are on the hook for millions over one thing and another and it all occurred on his watch. No one really believes that it was a coincidence that he was ousted on the day the data breach case went to court. Neither he nor Walsh were good for BA, the company is a demoralised shadow of itself and passengers - apart from the loyalty on the BA board of FT are pretty fed up.

GUWonder

This airline is still so heavily owned by Scandinavian government shareholders that I doubt they would be too eager to pick a CEO from beyond Scandinavia. And even if they were to do so for SAS, Alex Cruz would probably be the wrong kind of guy to deal with the dynamics that come with dealing with Scandinavian employee unions while also having the Danish and Swedish governments as big shareholder with their own concerns.

Before Walsh and Cruz did their business on BA, I used to be more positively inclined toward choosing BA over SAS and a bunch of other airlines. Not anymore after Walsh and Cruz did their hatchet jobs.

LondonAir is in a quite different position than SAS and has been for as long as I've been on FT. And doing a hatchet job on one's own company when the company was in a relatively stronger position than SAS finds itself in nowadays also may mean that not all lessons are transferable with the same kind of outcome.

If the objective of management is to be hyper-confrontational so as to extract some kind of advantage out of changing the employment structure and produce benefits for profit-seeking, shareholders in the game of flipping stocks, then SAS should probably try to buy out its government shareholders and then try to proceed from there.

Nick Art

I tend to agree. What happens if an unstoppable force hits an immovable object...

This is what I worry about. While on the balance sheet some of the things he made would even look good, the other monetary as well as non monetary damages he has done to the company are pretty much irreparable imho. I think at SK he'd do more damage than good and alienate the company from its customers.

johan rebel

BA's very own self-appointed Praetorian Guard!

Johan

CPH-Flyer

And yet the passenger numbers or the profitability never suffered from all of these fed up customers? In the end, what is good for the company is being profitable. The London hub does give a strong base to make people keep choosing BA, which they certainly have capitalised on, but every major airline flies to London, there is a choice for unhappy people.
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CPH-Flyer

Don't get me wrong, I don't believe a company should screw over their employees at every step where they can. The stunts BA took in the fall with basically firing any cabin crew not transitioning to the mixed fleet contract was pretty awful in my opinion.
However, a part of SK's financial woes have always been that their staffing is too expensive, maybe not so much directly in cash salary, but in efficiency. I think a lot was weeded out in the last major crisis, but if I listen or some of the points of Oliver2002, there are still structural challenges. Despite many years of trying, SK management have not been able to address. If Cruz is a bad or a good medicine for that is not obvious, but it certainly would be a new medicine.

GUWonder

I sort of believe that SAS is probably beyond saving as an independent in the absence of: a) repeated government sponsorship to keep it alive and independent; or just being left to string itself along without the government shareholders and the backing that comes from the involved governments.

I'm sure that SAS's headhunters will find some candidates for the SAS CEO job who will claim they have a plan that can deliver something that sounds better than "SAS will be a lost cause, so am I hired?".

CPH-Flyer

In some ways, SK is probably a lost cause. It is a bit like Alitalia, there has just been no getting through to the core of the issues.

Though after the last structural change it does seem to have been going a bit more smoothly on the financials, if not on the customer service.

oliver2002

Generation of CEOs have tried to tinker with the structural problems of SAS in the 2000s. Two problems they will never be able to solve: having atleast 3 hubs in the three countries with relative high labor costs AND fierce LCC competition at these hubs for both regional and longhaul traffic. BA doesn't have all that, they have one hub with very little LCC competition at that hub (yes LTN, STN & LGW are close, but not directly head to head). They also have fierce unions in the cabin and flight deck, which WW and AC have fought with and not really won much.

GUWonder

At least for a brief moment that LCC competition is more or less gone. And with SAS being down to just two governments as the big shareholders, maybe the ability for SAS to modify course at least a bit could be somewhat less challenging for a period of time than when there were three. But even if (a) the LCC competitors were to not return as more than a harmless shadow, and (b) SAS were to find itself down to one or no big government shareholders, then indeed too they would end up walking along the edge of a dangerously busy commercial road and be at risk of becoming potential roadkill for the monsters of the road that would leave them at least in part as one with the asphalt.