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Emirates vient de se faire racheter par Etihad selon une amie qui se trouve actuellement à Abu Dhabi.
Un article qui parlait des rumeurs de fusion:
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/to...cle5254612.ece
You can be sure that the rumours have reached the boardrooms of airlines from London to Dallas to Chicago and beyond ... and you can be pretty sure what the reaction has been. Horror. Dismay. Alarm.
In an era when Western airlines are struggling, downsizing and preparing to battle for fewer customers in a shrinking economy, the chattering classes in the Gulf are talking up the prospect of a merger between Emirates Airlines and Etihad Airways.
No amount of denials has stopped speculation that has gripped the Gulf over the past month, speculation that the Government of Abu Dhabi, which owns Etihad, will buy a 30 per cent stake in Emirates, which is owned by Dubai, or that there will be a full merger of the carriers.
Doubt over Dubai's ability to meet its debt obligations has led many businessmen in the city-state to become convinced that the Government will have to sell assets such as Emirates to survive.
It is a huge asset. While Western airlines are shrinking, Emirates is on course to become the largest international airline in the world some time during the next decade, having carried 21 million passengers last year. It has $60 billion (£39 billion) of aircraft on order, including 58 of the double-decker Airbus 380s, and will begin A380 services from Dubai to London on Monday.
Etihad is also growing. Set up by Abu Dhabi only five years ago, it is already carrying six million passengers a year and it, too, has an order book that most Western airlines could only dream of.
At the Farnborough Air Show this year James Hogan, the chief executive, placed aircraft orders worth up to $43 billion.
Close rivals in more ways than one - they sit only 75km (45 miles) apart - the airline-building race between Dubai and Abu Dhabi is based on geography. The Gulf sits between Asia, Africa and Europe: it is estimated that 3.5billion people live within an eight-hour flight of Dubai.
Any two leading cities anywhere in the world can be connected via Dubai or Abu Dhabi, which makes the Gulf the perfect transit hub. Passengers flying from Glasgow or Dublin, for example, can fly direct to Dubai or Abu Dhabi and on to Sydney or Tokyo, rather than transiting through both Heathrow and Hong Kong or Bangkok.
By building up their airlines and their airports, the Gulf states believe that they can snap up this traffic. It is an ambitious plan, but if the Gulf carriers succeed, they will place the Middle East at the centre of people and trade movements in the 21st century. So great is their challenge that some European governments, keen to protect their flag-carriers, have blocked Emirates from gaining access to their cities.
“Our strategy is about reducing the length of journey times and making the trip from A to Z as smooth as possible,” Mr Hogan said. “If we can offer more efficient journeys, there will be a shift in traffic to our region.”
With Emirates, Etihad and Qatar all following essentially the same strategy, there are doubts that all three can achieve their goal, which is perhaps why the Emirates-Etihad rumours have seemed so plausible.
Mr Hogan said: “The Gulf carriers do have a similar strategy, but if you ask me who my competition is, I'd say European and Asian carriers who want passengers to go through London or Hong Kong and not the Gulf.”
There is a shadow over this grand plan. With the global economic slowdown taking hold, Emirates said last month that its profits had slumped 88 per cent, while Etihad's ambition to break even by 2010 looks optimistic.
Yet Tim Clark, president of Emirates, is not convinced that the downturn will have the devastating impact on the Gulf's carriers that some predict. “Perhaps I'm getting long in the tooth, but I've seen so many of these crises in the last 35 years that I'm not going to get into knee-jerk reactions,” he said.
“After the first Gulf war, we were the last carrier in the region standing. We've been through it before. Things will get worse, but by summer next year we should be through it.”
Although both Emirates and Etihad are stacked with executives from Britain and Australia, they have developed cultures that resonate with the region they are based in.
At Emirates, Mr Clark presides over a meeting of senior managers two or three times a week. There is no agenda, they simply talk - and argue - like a family sitting down to dinner. In a region where big families dominate politics and business, Emirates' corporate culture seems to reflect its environment.
Mr Hogan has tapped into another important feature of life in the Middle East: hospitality. Offering hospitality to a stranger is ingrained in Arabs and Etihad aspires to make that part of its culture, too. “I don't compare myself to other airlines, I compare us to the top hotels where service and hospitality are essential to success.”
As for rumours of their impending merger, Mr Clark was unequivocal: “What the ownership does with us is up to them, but we have been assured that no asset sale will take place.”
And yet ... the talk persists. European carriers such as British Airways, Air France and Lufthansa know already that Emirates and Etihad pose a significant challenge already. Whether they go on to do so as one huge combined entity may depend on how the credit crunch hits Dubai in the coming months.
Un article qui parlait des rumeurs de fusion:
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/to...cle5254612.ece
You can be sure that the rumours have reached the boardrooms of airlines from London to Dallas to Chicago and beyond ... and you can be pretty sure what the reaction has been. Horror. Dismay. Alarm.
In an era when Western airlines are struggling, downsizing and preparing to battle for fewer customers in a shrinking economy, the chattering classes in the Gulf are talking up the prospect of a merger between Emirates Airlines and Etihad Airways.
No amount of denials has stopped speculation that has gripped the Gulf over the past month, speculation that the Government of Abu Dhabi, which owns Etihad, will buy a 30 per cent stake in Emirates, which is owned by Dubai, or that there will be a full merger of the carriers.
Doubt over Dubai's ability to meet its debt obligations has led many businessmen in the city-state to become convinced that the Government will have to sell assets such as Emirates to survive.
It is a huge asset. While Western airlines are shrinking, Emirates is on course to become the largest international airline in the world some time during the next decade, having carried 21 million passengers last year. It has $60 billion (£39 billion) of aircraft on order, including 58 of the double-decker Airbus 380s, and will begin A380 services from Dubai to London on Monday.
Etihad is also growing. Set up by Abu Dhabi only five years ago, it is already carrying six million passengers a year and it, too, has an order book that most Western airlines could only dream of.
At the Farnborough Air Show this year James Hogan, the chief executive, placed aircraft orders worth up to $43 billion.
Close rivals in more ways than one - they sit only 75km (45 miles) apart - the airline-building race between Dubai and Abu Dhabi is based on geography. The Gulf sits between Asia, Africa and Europe: it is estimated that 3.5billion people live within an eight-hour flight of Dubai.
Any two leading cities anywhere in the world can be connected via Dubai or Abu Dhabi, which makes the Gulf the perfect transit hub. Passengers flying from Glasgow or Dublin, for example, can fly direct to Dubai or Abu Dhabi and on to Sydney or Tokyo, rather than transiting through both Heathrow and Hong Kong or Bangkok.
By building up their airlines and their airports, the Gulf states believe that they can snap up this traffic. It is an ambitious plan, but if the Gulf carriers succeed, they will place the Middle East at the centre of people and trade movements in the 21st century. So great is their challenge that some European governments, keen to protect their flag-carriers, have blocked Emirates from gaining access to their cities.
“Our strategy is about reducing the length of journey times and making the trip from A to Z as smooth as possible,” Mr Hogan said. “If we can offer more efficient journeys, there will be a shift in traffic to our region.”
With Emirates, Etihad and Qatar all following essentially the same strategy, there are doubts that all three can achieve their goal, which is perhaps why the Emirates-Etihad rumours have seemed so plausible.
Mr Hogan said: “The Gulf carriers do have a similar strategy, but if you ask me who my competition is, I'd say European and Asian carriers who want passengers to go through London or Hong Kong and not the Gulf.”
There is a shadow over this grand plan. With the global economic slowdown taking hold, Emirates said last month that its profits had slumped 88 per cent, while Etihad's ambition to break even by 2010 looks optimistic.
Yet Tim Clark, president of Emirates, is not convinced that the downturn will have the devastating impact on the Gulf's carriers that some predict. “Perhaps I'm getting long in the tooth, but I've seen so many of these crises in the last 35 years that I'm not going to get into knee-jerk reactions,” he said.
“After the first Gulf war, we were the last carrier in the region standing. We've been through it before. Things will get worse, but by summer next year we should be through it.”
Although both Emirates and Etihad are stacked with executives from Britain and Australia, they have developed cultures that resonate with the region they are based in.
At Emirates, Mr Clark presides over a meeting of senior managers two or three times a week. There is no agenda, they simply talk - and argue - like a family sitting down to dinner. In a region where big families dominate politics and business, Emirates' corporate culture seems to reflect its environment.
Mr Hogan has tapped into another important feature of life in the Middle East: hospitality. Offering hospitality to a stranger is ingrained in Arabs and Etihad aspires to make that part of its culture, too. “I don't compare myself to other airlines, I compare us to the top hotels where service and hospitality are essential to success.”
As for rumours of their impending merger, Mr Clark was unequivocal: “What the ownership does with us is up to them, but we have been assured that no asset sale will take place.”
And yet ... the talk persists. European carriers such as British Airways, Air France and Lufthansa know already that Emirates and Etihad pose a significant challenge already. Whether they go on to do so as one huge combined entity may depend on how the credit crunch hits Dubai in the coming months.
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