Australia’s domestic aviation market is awash with flights, benefiting passengers rather than airlines, the head of Qantas Airways Ltd’s local business said.
“There’s a lot of capacity sloshing round the Australian marketplace overall,” Lyell Strambi, chief executive officer of Qantas Domestic, said at a briefing at Sydney airport yesterday. “Ultimately the winners are the customers.”
Flight capacity in the domestic market in the December half is running about 12 percent more than its level last year, whittling profitability for carriers aiming to match the supply of seats to demand, Russell Shaw, an analyst at Macquarie Group Ltd, said by phone Nov. 7.
A measure of business-class ticket prices has fallen 40 percent in the past year to two-decade lows as Virgin Australia Holdings Ltd stepped up competition with Sydney-based Qantas, Australia’s largest carrier.
There had been “some adjustments in capacity” in the last few months without any significant reduction in growth, John Borghetti, Virgin’s chief executive officer, said on Tuesday last week.
“Competition is certainly very aggressive now and competition will always be aggressive,” he said.
A move announced yesterday by Qantas to switch all services that fly between the Western Australian capital, Perth, and Sydney and Melbourne, to Airbus SAS A330s from May will not significantly affect domestic capacity, Strambi said.
The bulk of additional seats that Virgin is adding come from switching to wide-body jets like the A330 on routes between Australia’s east and west coasts, Borghetti said last week.
Qantas’s A330s will replace Boeing Co 767s on east-west routes, which will be moved to the busier east-coast network, Strambi said yesterrday.
Virgin plans to buy a controlling stake in Tiger Airways Holdings Ltd’s local unit and to take over Skywest Airlines Ltd, the company announced on Oct. 30, in a deal that would raise its share of the Australian domestic market to about 35 percent from 30 percent at the moment.
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
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],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained