Thai Airways head vows to push company's transformation

 

He made the remark after the THAI board met with the State Enterprise Policy Committee on Monday.

Charamporn said THAI had seen some progress with the overall transformation plan but it was still moving too slowly in its efforts to cut costs and improve revenue from commercial operations, so it would have to pick up the pace. 

He added that other plans such as the sale of retired aircraft and flight reductions had been on track.

He said all departments had their own operational targets but some appeared to be taking too long to start implementing the turnaround programmes. This might be because the national flag carrier had never made such a large-scale transformation at such a fast pace before.

During the first quarter of 2015, THAI launched the transformation plan, with the first stage designed to stop the bleeding.

Taweesak Kor-anantakul, a member of the State Enterprise Policy Committee’s sub-panel screening the state enterprises’ problem-solving plans, said after the meeting with the THAI board on Monday that the committee had advised the board to communicate with the management that THAI was still in a critical situation. 

He added that the THAI turnaround plan looked quite promising but as of the third quarter the company had still not achieved some targets, especially cost reductions. But some targets were achieved, including turning around the cargo operation from loss to profitability.

When Charamporn took over as the airline’s president early this year, he kicked off a two-year programme to return THAI to profitability after years of chronic heavy losses. Recently, he said THAI aimed to achieve 70 per cent of the turn-around programme by January, 2016, meaning it would have returned to operating profitability around that time. 

The overall programme should be completed in 2017.