Jet Airways, India’s second largest carrier by domestic market share, on Tuesday reported its biggest-ever quarterly loss as higher fuel costs and taxes weigh on airlines and high competition limits fare increases. With this, the company reported a staggering annual loss of Rs 4,129 crore loss, which may be second only to Air India’s estimated loss of Rs 5,400 crore in the last fiscal. The airline flew into a loss of Rs 2,153.57 crore for Q4 FY14, the highest ever by a private airline in India, as against Rs 495.53 crore in the same period of last year. The total income, however, grew nearly 13 per cent to Rs 5,082.5 crore. The Jet Airways board, which met in Mumbai, agreed to a series of critical measures which will lay the foundation to rebuild the business. It also brought in Cramer Ball, former CEO of Air Seychelles, as the CEO of the company. Jet Airways chairman Naresh Goyal said: “We need to take stringent measures to ensure our success in this challenging and competitive aviation industry. There can be no short-term solutions. The changes required will take time to implement.Our first priority on the journey to profitability will be to establish a more solid financial foundation for this airline.” In one of its first steps, it said the board and management team worked to clean up the balance sheet, which includes writing down overvalued non-cash assets. On the full year loss, it said the operating loss was Rs 2,076.2 crore, non-cash extraordinary write-down of Rs 936 crore, aircraft-on-ground of Rs 417.6 crore and impairment of goodwill of Rs 700 crore. Leading airline advisors, Seabury APG completed a new long-term network and fleet plan which will be implemented to optimise Jet Airways domestic and international operations.
