Airlines lobby against additional rights to Middle Eastern carriers
NEW DELHI: Indian airlines part of the lobby group Federation of Indian Airlines (FIA) have opposed the grant of additional rights to Middle Eastern airlines in India. “We have learnt from the travel trade in Dubai that Emirates and flydubai plan to operate additional flights to Kerala in the months of August and September 2017, ostensibly to cater to peak season traffic,” FIA wrote to the aviation ministry, in a letter dated July 20 that was reviewed by
“The UAE (United Arab Emirates) carriers should not be allowed to operate additional flights in excess of their capacity entitlements, as the existing capacity entitlements adequately cater to the traffic demand between lndia and Dubai. Furthermore, the carriers of both sides are already utilising the entitlements fully, deploying in excess of 130,000 seats per week in each direction between lndia and Dubai,” the letter stated.
FIA is led by InterGlobe Aviation Pvt. Ltd-run IndiGo, SpiceJet Ltd, Jet Airways (India) Ltd and GoAir that, between them, control about 75% of the domestic market. The Dubai-based airlines currently have a large number of aircraft lying idle, due to the downturn in the economies of the Middle East and the withdrawal of multiple daily flights between Dubai and Qatar, as a result of which they want to tap India’s peak traffic in AugustSeptember, vitiating the levelplaying field between the airlines of both sides, added the FIA letter.
The local airlines feel revenues and profits earned by them in the peak season as well as sustainability of operations on the Kerala-Dubai sector will be hit by grant of additional rights to the foreign airlines.
“It is our urgent submission to your kind offices that any request from the UAE carriers to operate additional flights to and from Kerala should not be acceded to and the level-playing field be maintained,” said FIA. Responses from Emirates and flydubai were awaited at the time of going to press.
Local airlines have told the aviation ministry separately, according to an airline official who did not want to be named, that bilaterals should only be given on mutually acceptable terms. SAN FRANCISCO: Microsoft on Thursday reported strong fourthquarter earnings on the back of its fast-growing cloud computing business, stoking optimism that the once-stagnant company has found a new groove.
The results were the clearest sign yet that the strategy put in place by Chief Executive Satya Nadella when he assumed the top job in 2014 is paying off.
He has shifted the company’s focus away from a dying personal computer software business and reinventing it as a provider of cloud computing and subscription-based software.
“Our technology world view of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge is resonating with customers everywhere,” Nadella said on the company’s earnings conference call with investors on Thursday.
Most notably, revenue from the cloud unit, which includes the flagship Azure platform and server products, rose about 11 percent to $7.43 billion in the fiscal fourth quarter ended June 30.
Analysts on average had expected cloud revenue of $7.32 billion, according to data and analytics firm FactSet.
Revenue from Azure, which competes directly with Amazon.com’s market-leading AWS division, nearly doubled in the quarter.
Highlighting Azure’s growth were notable increases to Microsoft’s long-term unearned revenue, which rose by more than 61 percent year-over-year.
The metric is used to indicate long-term commitments for services and products, said Kim Forrest, vice-president and senior equity analyst at Fort Pitt Capital Group, a portfolio management firm. In a bid to continue this momentum, Microsoft last week launched Azure Stack, a new service that allows customers to run a local version of the company’s cloud technology.
Michael Turits, analyst at Raymond James & Associates, noted that Azure is smaller than Amazon’s service but that it is growing faster. “I think it is appealing well to existing enterprise customers who might not immediately be drawn to the Amazon platform,” he said.