British Airways PLC (BA) announced on Friday that it will ground aircraft, slash seat numbers and postpone taking delivery of a dozen new Airbus A380 superjumbos as it faces a recession-driven decline in passengers.
The airline said it carried 2.93 million passengers last month, 5 percent fewer than last June.
BA said that in response to the “challenging economic conditions” it was cutting its summer capacity by 3.5 percent, rather than the originally forecast 2.5 percent. Capacity for October through March next year is expected to be down by 5 percent.
GROUNDED
The airline said it would ground three Boeing 757 aircraft in the middle of next year and three Boeing 747-400s the following winter.
BA also said it was postponing by an average of five months delivery of its first six A380s, the first of which is still due to arrive in 2012. Delivery of a second batch of six is being delayed by an average of two years, with the final plane due to arrive in 2016.
BA’s planes were 79.6 percent full last month compared with 81.4 percent a year earlier. The steepest drops were in first- and business-class traffic and on routes between London and Asia.
‘CHALLENGING’
“Market conditions continue to be very challenging with trading at levels well below last year,” BA said in a statement. “However, on an underlying basis both premium and non-premium volumes and seat factors have now been stable for more than three months.”
The airline is seeking to cut 3,500 jobs and bring in a pay freeze as part of a cost-cutting package. Talks with unions have failed to reach agreement and more negotiations are planned next week with a government-backed mediator.
British Airways, which employs 40,000 people, is looking to cut 2,000 flight attendants and 1,500 ground workers.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts