V Air (威航), a budget airline fully owned by TransAsia Airways Corp (復興航空), yesterday announced plans to bow out of the local market to curb losses due to sharpening competition.
The carrier is to stop operations in October, allowing TransAsia Airways to better consolidate its resources and stem mounting losses.
The announcement came after TransAsia’s board of directors approved the decision.
“The move is part of the company’s long-term transformation plans to optimize resource utilization and lower operating costs,” TransAsia chairman Vincent Lin (林明昇) said in a statement following a board meeting.
Lin also pledged to prioritize improving flight safety standards and to look after the interests of affected employees.
The company’s business has taken a hit after two fatal accidents involving TransAsia aircraft in July 2014 and February last year.
After absorbing its subsidiary, TransAsia hopes to become a versatile carrier capable of distinguishing itself from low-budget competitors, company spokeswoman Amy Chen (陳逸潔) said.
“We aim to provide passengers with different options in terms of in-flight meal variety and check-in luggage allowances, as we position the company somewhere between the budget and full-service market segments,” Chen said.
The firm plans to release an updated business plan soon, she said.
V Air, which launched in December 2014, last year recorded losses of NT$450 million (US$14.31 million at the current exchange rate). Its bottom line continued to deteriorate, with aggregate losses in the first half of this year exceeding NT$900 million.
Amid intense competition, V Air burned through more than half of its founding paid-in capital of NT$2 billion, company data showed.
V Air has four aircraft, two of which were added to its fleet in January and March, and covers routes to nine destinations, including Thailand, Japan and South Korea.
TransAsia said that it would take over two V Air routes to Chiang Mai, Thailand, and Fukuoka, Japan, and pledged that affected passengers would be reimbursed.
The company added that V Air’s most popular destinations are Bangkok and Chiang Mai, with flights to the destinations operating at 77 percent capacity on average.
TransAsia reported a net loss of NT$439 million for the first quarter, easing from a net loss of NT$1.16 billion in the previous quarter.
Sales retreated significantly from NT$10.58 billion in the fourth quarter of last year to NT$3.2 billion in the first quarter of this year.
TransAsia shares yesterday gained 0.95 percent to NT$6.36, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed.
Sweeping policy changes under US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr are having a chilling effect on vaccine makers as anti-vaccine rhetoric has turned into concrete changes in inoculation schedules and recommendations, investors and executives said. The administration of US President Donald Trump has in the past year upended vaccine recommendations, with the country last month ending its longstanding guidance that all children receive inoculations against flu, hepatitis A and other diseases. The unprecedented changes have led to diminished vaccine usage, hurt the investment case for some biotechs, and created a drag that would likely dent revenues and
Global semiconductor stocks advanced yesterday, as comments by Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) at Davos, Switzerland, helped reinforce investor enthusiasm for artificial intelligence (AI). Samsung Electronics Co gained as much as 5 percent to an all-time high, helping drive South Korea’s benchmark KOSPI above 5,000 for the first time. That came after the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index rose more than 3 percent to a fresh record on Wednesday, with a boost from Nvidia. The gains came amid broad risk-on trade after US President Donald Trump withdrew his threat of tariffs on some European nations over backing for Greenland. Huang further
CULPRITS: Factors that affected the slip included falling global crude oil prices, wait-and-see consumer attitudes due to US tariffs and a different Lunar New Year holiday schedule Taiwan’s retail sales ended a nine-year growth streak last year, slipping 0.2 percent from a year earlier as uncertainty over US tariff policies affected demand for durable goods, data released on Friday by the Ministry of Economic Affairs showed. Last year’s retail sales totaled NT$4.84 trillion (US$153.27 billion), down about NT$9.5 billion, or 0.2 percent, from 2024. Despite the decline, the figure was still the second-highest annual sales total on record. Ministry statistics department deputy head Chen Yu-fang (陳玉芳) said sales of cars, motorcycles and related products, which accounted for 17.4 percent of total retail rales last year, fell NT$68.1 billion, or
Macronix International Co (旺宏), the world’s biggest NOR flash memory supplier, yesterday said it would spend NT$22 billion (US$699.1 million) on capacity expansion this year to increase its production of mid-to-low-density memory chips as the world’s major memorychip suppliers are phasing out the market. The company said its planned capital expenditures are about 11 times higher than the NT$1.8 billion it spent on new facilities and equipment last year. A majority of this year’s outlay would be allocated to step up capacity of multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory chips, which are used in embedded multimedia cards (eMMC), a managed
RSS