China Airlines Co (
Under the program, the two carriers can sell seats on each other's trans-Pacific flights.
The partnership helps bring Delta Air back to Taiwan after it pulled out of the country nine years ago.
"Taiwan is a market filled with opportunity, with growth in tourism and rapidly expanding trade," Paul Matsen, a Delta senior vice president, told reporters in Taipei yesterday.
"We hope to expand the cooperation to include destinations beyond the Taiwan carrier's hub," Matsen said.
As of today, Delta will use its code for China Airlines flights from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Honolulu, Seattle and New York (JFK) to Taipei.
In June last year, China Airlines began to use its code for Delta flights from Los Angeles and San Francisco to Atlanta, Dallas, Cincinnati, Salt Lake City and Honolulu .
"The agreement is a milestone for us, indicating that Delta, the world's second-largest airline [by passengers carried], trusts us and is willing to put its customers in our hands," said Philip Wei (
Burt Pinoli, general manager of Delta's Asia division, based in Beijing, told the Taipei Times yesterday that Delta is anxious to re-enter the Taiwan market.
The US carrier left Taiwan at the end of 1995, when the US airline industry was experiencing a downturn.
"We view Taiwan, as well as the whole of Asia, as a very important area considering the strong economic growth in recent years. For Delta, the best thing to do is to make partnerships, as we have a limited presence in the region on our own," Pinoli said.
China, the world's fastest growing economy, is a main target for Delta to fly its own service, Pinoli said.
Delta has a code-sharing agreement with China Southern Airlines Co (中國南方航空) on the Los Angeles-Guangzhou route.
The carrier hopes to add Chinese destinations, either by using their planes or through code-sharing with Chinese carriers, Pinoli said.
But the plan may not be realized in the near term, as the US authorities are still negotiating with their Chinese counterparts on opening more destinations for US carriers.
Delta early last month announced a first-quarter net loss of US$383 million, or US$3.12 a share.
The first-quarter result was an improvement from a year ago, when Delta had a net loss of US$466 million, or US$3.81 a share.
Last year Delta started a discount service, Song, which Pinoli said had seen good results.
The US aviation industry has been struggling to recover from a series of setbacks: the Sept. 11 attacks, the SARS outbreak, the US-led war against Iraq and now soaring fuel costs.
Pinoli added that the growing popularity of low-cost carriers is a threat to the large, established airlines in the US.
"We hope to continue to develop this sector, while providing our original full service to customers," Pinoli said.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
Hong Kong authorities ramped up sales of the local dollar as the greenback’s slide threatened the foreign-exchange peg. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) sold a record HK$60.5 billion (US$7.8 billion) of the city’s currency, according to an alert sent on its Bloomberg page yesterday in Asia, after it tested the upper end of its trading band. That added to the HK$56.1 billion of sales versus the greenback since Friday. The rapid intervention signals efforts from the city’s authorities to limit the local currency’s moves within its HK$7.75 to HK$7.85 per US dollar trading band. Heavy sales of the local dollar by
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
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