Businessworld has an combative interview with Captain G.R. Gopinath, Founder & CEO of Air Deccan, the pioneering low-cost airline which is, unfortunatly, best known these days among travellers for its delayed take-offs and cancellations.
Notoriety is not such a bad thing. Converting it into fame requires just some tweaking.
Anyway, next financial year, we will overtake Jet in terms of market share (with 57 aircraft). It is inevitable. Growth cannot be stopped. Stopping growth will be the end of me. Once you have the market share and this irrationality stabilises, you just have to tweak your fare by a few hundred rupees to get into profits.
That’s what Airtel did. They were under loss. They continued to expand and buy companies. They worked on getting a larger and larger market share. Once you have control of the market, you just have to tweak the fares slightly. It’s a volumes game. In that desperate run, there are bound to be operational problems.
Arun Natarajan is the Founder of Venture Intelligence, which tracks private equity and venture capital in India and Indian-founded companies worldwide. View sample issues of Venture Intelligence India newsletters and reports.
