Il costo del combustibile frena la crescita delle compagnie aeree mondiali

Le compagnie di navigazione aerea mondiali hanno registrato lo scorso anno un calo dei profitti pari a 1,2 miliardi di dollari. Il dato è stato reso noto nel corso dell'assemblea annuale della IATA (International Air Transport Association), che si è aperta ieri a Sydney. Il direttore generale della IATA, Pierre Jeanniot, ha spiegato che «nello scorso anno, la pressione congiunta dell'incremento del costo del combustibile e l'erosione dei redditi ha notevolmente spremuto le compagnie aeree». Nel suo intervento, che riportiamo di seguito, Jeanniot ha rilevato che i profitti complessivi dei vettori aerei membri della IATA nel 1998 e nel 1999 sono stati di soli 5 miliardi di dollari, l'1,7% del risultato operativo. Complessivamente le entrate delle compagnie della IATA relative ai voli internazionali sono state lo scorso anno di 146,3 miliardi di dollari, con un incremnto di 3,6 miliardi di dollari rispetto all'anno precedente. I costi sono però cresciuti nel raffronto tra i due anni di 4,3 miliardi di dollari, raggiungendo un totale di 140,9 miliardi di dollari nel 1999. La differenza fra il reddito operativo e le spese, che nel 1998 era di 6,3 miliardi di dollari, è calato nel 1999 a 5,4 miliardi di dollari.

Lo scorso anno le compagnie che fanno parte della IATA hanno trasportato complessivamente 1,6 miliardi di passeggeri. Le previsioni indicano per i prossimi quattro anni un incremento medio del 5% di questo volume di traffico. Jeanniot ha indicato in oltre 2,3 miliardi l'anno il numero di viaggi/passeggero sulle rotte di linea che potrà essere raggiunto entro il 2010. Il settore merci dovrebbe invece registrare un tasso di crescita del 5,5% fino al 2003.
L'industria del trasporto aereo - ha detto Jeanniot - è il motore principale del turismo, contribuisce con oltre 3,5 trilioni di dollari all'economia mondiale e genera l'8% di tutti i posti di lavoro.

Parlando dei problemi che si frappongono alla regolare crescita del settore aereo, Jeanniot ha inoltre accusato i governi europei di non voler allentare la loro stretta sul controllo del traffico aereo, creando quella che il direttore generale della IATA ha definito una «confusione medioevale».

"STATE OF THE INDUSTRY"

ADDRESS TO 56th IATA AGM
Sydney, Monday 5 June 2000
Pierre J. Jeanniot, Director General

It has been more than a quarter of a century since IATA held its Annual General Meeting "down under" and that's a long time. To make sure that from the very start of this meeting we should all have the right perspective, I thought you should be reminded how Australian maps look at the world.

Our view of things depends very much on where we happen to be and - as people here will be rather keen to remind us - we are not "down under" but "up top"!

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A warm welcome all of you - our Members, Industry partners, guests, the media and, in our customary fashion, let me extend a warm welcome to this AGM to all those airlines who have joined IATA since Rio last year.

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Rather than take the time here to provide you with a full picture of the many activities we accomplished last year, I would recommend that you read this year's IATA annual report. To facilitate digestion, it comes in the four-page multilingual snack version which you can also find in our regular flagship publication "Airlines International." It also comes in the regular fifty-page English language Banquet version (and I do mean English language not English cuisine).

Both versions are quite nutritious depending on the size of your appetite and so are the reports of the four Standing Committees, which I now formally table, as well as the reports of the various task forces and other ad-hoc committees.

Once again, everyone has made an excellent contribution and on your behalf and mine I want to extend our gratitude.

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The Annual Report will show that our industry, on its international scheduled services at least, has achieved net profitability for a sixth successive year. This is very welcome news and we hope it has now become a habit! Looking at our past financial performance, I would make just a couple of observations:

As you can see, the "fat" years are not very fat and the preceding "lean" years were very lean!
In fact looking at the last two years, collectively, the net profit should be about three times higher if we are to attract new investment and continue to invest in the latest fuel efficient, environmentally friendly technology.
During the past year, the twin pressures of fuel cost increases and yield erosion have squeezed airlines rather hard. The best way to illustrate that is to look at the trend of the two load factors - the actual and the break-even - both of them climbing and the gap between them narrowing.

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We met in this region 25 years ago and 25 years before that our AGM was held on the other side of this famous Pacific Rim, in San Francisco.

At the start of this new Millennium it may be interesting to glance back to those embryonic days of aviation in 1950 to see what successes we were having and what a strange set of concerns and issues would await us.

At the IATA AGM held in San Francisco in 1950 we heard that uniform operating methods and procedures had been achieved to the point where a Dutch pilot flying a US built aircraft regarded a landing at Calcutta as no more difficult than a landing at Amsterdam. One would hope that this is still true everywhere today.

The 1950 AGM was also told that anyone buying a standard IATA ticket could now pay for it using the universal air travel card, recently introduced. Another great innovation we did not choose to capitalise on!

That year the airlines stated that their main objective was to reduce the price of the airline product while continuing to improve our safety, our reliability and our customer appeal. The passage of 50 years has done nothing to change that objective!

Our predecessors in San Francisco were warned that price reductions must be preceded by a reduction in costs because an industry as large as ours must ultimately be financially self-supporting. And as we know, it took another 40 years for the goal of financial self-support to become a reality for most airlines.

One more thing from San Francisco in 1950, the Director General delivered an address that took approximately two hours. As you will undoubtedly read the Annual Report, I can get away with a lot less!

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Over the years our industry successfully faced many challenges. In Rio last year, we suggested that we now needed to deal with five "Millennium Challenges." These were globalisation versus local identity, financial shocks or volatility, the environment, connectivity and the changing role of governments. These challenges are more than ever relevant.

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Since Rio, the question of "globalisation versus local identity" was clearly demonstrated at the WTO "Battle of Seattle" and at the Davos World Economic Forum, where very diverse groups of people got together to voice their concerns. Amusingly enough, these very diverse groups were able to coordinate their actions via the Internet - a symbol of the very globalisation they decry!

As an airline industry our objective must be to take maximum advantage of the benefits of globalisation while minimising its inconvenience. Among the world airlines there is a wide consensus that the WTO approach is simply not appropriate - it is too much a case of "one size fits all."

We have a major session on aviation regulation this afternoon, so let me make just a few points now:

The answer to the challenge of globalisation, in the context of aviation, is to encourage flexible and increasingly liberalised developments by like-minded groups of nations and airlines.
In my view, a major step to increase liberalisation would be for governments to further relax their rules on foreign ownership, leading to potential cross-border mergers. But will governments display the courage required to allow those to take place?
Finally, as events continue to demonstrate that certain alliances will remain fragile we are reminded that the ultimate airline alliance - IATA - is still here as it was in San Francisco 50 years ago.

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Financial shocks are not going to go away as we venture further into a new century. It is only the source and nature of such shocks that will vary over time.

Three years ago we saw a "domino effect" of economic instability spreading across Asian markets. Before that there was the Mexican debt question. After Asia, the problem of the Brazilian currency. Last year, our industry suffered a mini-shock generated by the close to 200 percent rise in the price of oil but hopefully the last OPEC agreement has brought oil prices back to a more reasonable level.

And very recently we have experienced the excessive volatility of hi-tech and particularly e-stocks which at times have defied all the conventional wisdom about price/earnings ratios. The complexity of the current situation suggests that today no-one truly understands the economy!

The fact remains that leisure travel having become the dominant component of the world air travel market some time ago, our industry is now highly dependent on the available discretionary income. Thus any financial shock will significantly affect the size, origin and profitability of that market.

You will not be surprised if I remind you that part of the answer to this challenge consists of restraint in adding capacity. Over the next 20 years our total fleet requirements could amount to some 16,000 aircraft. An improved match of aircraft entering service with traffic demand growth would do wonders for our profitability!

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Despite the fine and often repeated record of our industry the environment will continue to present an important challenge - but we are coming to terms with it! The recent focus of attention has been aircraft noise, specifically:

The need for a global cost-effective approach through ICAO to the coming new "chapter 4" noise standard.
With the assurance that any future noise rules will co-exist with any new emissions rules.
We must protect fleet values in a predictable framework for fleet planning with performance-based noise standards rather than design-based.
A world consensus will need imaginative and flexible solutions.

An ICAO CAEP/5 working group has been studying "market based options" for reducing emissions. The four options are taxes, charges, voluntary agreements and emissions trading. We are proposing voluntary agreement but are firmly opposed to any new taxes.

To counteract mis-information about our industry we have developed an "advocacy paper" on airlines and the environment that is available for you to use.

As far as fuel is concerned, as I have been saying for the past year, Europe must have the courage to move on ATC which at the moment causes us to waste 6-12 percent of our fuel efficiency with a resulting negative environmental impact. I hardly need to remind you that we also need to exploit the full fuel-saving benefits of CNS/ATM elsewhere in the world.

We have also conducted an environment campaign test which indicates that the travelling public is reasonably well-informed about the benefits of air travel and its actual environmental impact. Our task is to ensure that we win the "hearts & minds" of our publics.

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Interconnectability - connectivity is here fuelling more than ever the E-commerce fever which at this time dominates our strategic thinking somewhat excessively.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that this is not a very promising field if sensibly applied but it will not change our fundamentals - and there are some pitfalls!

The growth of this phenomenon is everywhere and it is bringing together what, on the face of it, might seem strange sets of partners. Who would have expected Members of rival alliances to get together in a "web portal initiative" for example?

Hopefully, we have learnt some lessons from our CRS experience. For we would not want to say, a few years from now, it's déja vu all over again!

IATA is also very much involved in E-commerce to set standards and has proposed the development of an international E-ticket interchange facility as well as promoting an industry B-2-B project with various financial and system partners. Such an industry wide approach would be operated as an industry cooperative - not unlike the Clearing House.

We are also very much aware that E-commerce is at the root of the revolution in the airline distribution system, causing changes and much dismay among the agent community. As we will learn tomorrow, there is an urgent and now a formally recognised need to re-establish much closer working relationships with agents.

Where will all the E-commerce activity lead? Time/Warner and America Online have merged to form a total distribution company. One provides the content and the other the means of distribution.

Can we look forward to the first formal merger between an internet service provider and an airline? On the basis that "you've sampled the virtual, now experience the reality?" I look forward to a lively debate on all this in our session tomorrow morning!

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We were reminded last year in Rio that the state does not need to own the "commanding heights" of its economy, and thus governments everywhere are reassessing their need for ownership and management of the aviation industry.

As increased liberalisation proceeds, there are a number of principles which should serve as guidelines for the market evolution and for the development of any future specific regulation. We will be discussing these later on today. But let me say now that every country or trading bloc needs to define for itself just what it wants and expects from civil aviation. It needs a vision - .to boldly go where this industry has not been before! But the lack of coherent vision in many parts of the world is resulting in deficient and inefficient aviation infrastructure.

Governments and aviation infrastructure providers must recognise the fact that over the foreseeable period demand for aviation products & services will continue to double every 10-14 years. That's what people - airline consumers - seem to want.

Our main efforts in the past year of necessity have been applied to sorting out European ATC which is a medieval mess!

We have forcefully stated the way forward for Europe's ATC which requires a pan-European planning process but also to put ATC provision on a liberalised, independent footing. With ATC in Europe still in the hands of governments, our industry cannot fully respond to the market forces - it is infrastructure driven. This is re-regulation through the back door!

The US ATC system also has its well-known problems. The solution, as in Europe, involves the separation of service provision and regulation as well as self-financing.

CAN/ATM still lacks a clear global implementation plan, which means that avionics planning for our fleet remains a challenge.

On the airport side, I must mention the manner in which airport privatisation has unfolded in some Latin-American countries. This has been simply disastrous. To provide proper safeguards for future liberalisation we have suggested a set of guidelines, now called the "Santiago Declaration."

And with the resumption of growth in Asia we have the potential of renewed capacity constraint on certain routes and airports such as Narita (Japan).

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Every effort that IATA makes, for example:

To keep the multilateral interline system fully open for use.
To ensure that the industry achieved a totally glitch-free "Y2K" transition.
To ensure the retention of vital radio spectrum at the ITU.
In bringing together the necessary coalition partners to streamline and speed up the flow of passengers through airports - our SPT project.
To rejuvenate and re-launch our safety efforts.

All these are illustrations of our many activities and show that we are just as concerned with safety, reliability, quality of service and price as our predecessors were in San Francisco for that embryonic industry 50 years ago.

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I will cite just two of these activities, first safety:

As you know, IATA's prime strategic objective is aimed at halving the accident rate by 2004, compared to the base year 1995. Towards this, we developed a seven-point programme based around technology enhancements, an increased human factors focus, improved information analyses and infrastructure improvements.

The trend line of loss-rate offers some encouragement for our objective but there is some way still to go. Every new generation of aircraft is safer as you will see from the next chart.

A major initiative introduced this year was the application of operational quality standards (OQS) for new member entrance qualification. Jürgen Weber is going to report on our first experience of OQS right after coffee.

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For the second example of our many activities, let me "show-case" SPT - Simplifying Passenger Travel - because it is typical of our many problems requiring a total industry approach! Anyone who questions the need for this should read Art Buchwald on the subject. Here is what he said:

"I am an expert on waiting in line at counters. It is the most interesting part of flying and it gets really exciting when they can't find your name in the computer. The clerks enjoy this because the search is on. What makes it dangerous is that people behind you want to kill you."

At the heart of the SPT initiative is the vision that a future system in which passenger air travel can be simplified and streamlined, using emerging technologies to compress current multiple procedures into a single "one-stop" process.

Since our AGM last year, the SPT program has taken a significant step forward with the creation of a self-funding Interest Group incorporating technology suppliers and system integrators with airlines, airports and control authorities, to work on practical implementation steps. The Group's mission is to promote, test and develop the SPT concept. It already has 18 members and more airlines and airports, in particular, are encouraged to join.

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Mr. President, our customers keep coming back for more and we think that 1.6 billion air trips taken last year is a good indication that this industry is growth oriented and that we must be doing something right! But with the high volumes that we handle it would not be totally unrealistic for us to have dropped a few balls.

Unfortunately, this could give some authorities an excuse to intervene. There are still, within various governments, regulators looking for things to regulate!

We must pay attention to these signs. I have often said, "an industry which does not regulate itself often deserves to be regulated."

With this in mind we will be proposing to you today a new "global customer service framework." This is a set of guidelines which should be of some help in clearing up the confusion and in setting up your own voluntary "customer rights."

Let me emphasise that there is a real danger of de facto re-regulation by the back door from at least three directions that I have discussed today:

Shortcomings in aviation infrastructure which amount to de facto rationing of capacity.
Increasing restrictions on aircraft use in the name of environmental protection.
The notion those governments need to legislate on extended consumer "bills of rights" rather than allowing the free market to operate.

Clearly, we have yet to get the message across to certain governments and various opinion makers that air transport is a major success story - not only in terms of service delivered and dreams fulfilled but also in terms of jobs created and wealth generated.

We have the potential to offer so much more to the world economy with relatively modest marginal demands on capital and other resources. A brief look at the history and of our potential should prove convincing:

The world scheduled air transport industry has grown from an estimated 9 million passenger journeys in 1945 to about 1.6 billion in 1999.
Today, around 40 percent of the world's manufactured exports, by value, are transported by air.
The average consumer of scheduled airline products is paying 70 percent less in real terms than he or she was paying 20 years ago.

In 1998 the industry provided at least:

28 million jobs for the world's workforce
USD 1,360 billion in gross annual output.

Although we have achieved some degree of maturity, international air transport is still today one of the fastest growing sectors of the world economy.

Passenger and freight traffic are expected to increase at an average annual rate of around 5 percent between 1999 and 2010, significantly greater than the growth of global GDP.
By 2010, the number of passenger journeys by air could exceed 2.3 billion each year.

In an increasingly global society, the economic and social contribution of this industry to the world is highly significant and continues to grow:

International aviation is the prime engine of travel and tourism which presently contributes more than USD 3,500 billion to the world economy, or nearly 12 percent of the total.
More than 192 million jobs are generated - 8 percent of the world total.
Capital investment for travel and tourism is at present USD 733 billion a year - this represents more than 11 percent of the world total.

That's a proud record and an enormous potential. The critical question is can the potential be realised? Certainly this will not be easy, as the Red Queen in "Alice in Wonderland" observed!

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The potential can be realised if governments can be persuaded to share our enthusiasm and:

Recognise that infrastructure needs also to become "market responsive" but of course with the necessary oversight.
That in providing an environment for airlines to grow and be profitable the returns to their national economy can be highly significant.

At Davos last January at the World Economic Forum, we were instrumental in proposing and getting endorsed a declaration on travel and tourism that encompasses the notion of global prosperity through sustainable development. In essence, this declaration says:

The people of the world have a right to travel by air and to see the world.
Governments have a responsibility to provide the right infrastructure at a reasonable cost.
Airlines have a responsibility to operate in an environmentally sustainable manner.
Travellers have a responsibility to respect countries' cultures, traditions and antiquities.

As you will be aware, Davos is a unique forum. Heads of Governments go there to talk and to listen. If we can establish a strong presence for aviation as the driver of travel and tourism, at Davos, we will have done this industry a valuable service.

Mr. President, our industry has a great future but all the actors- governments, infrastructure providers and airlines need to share the same vision. The formula for success remains largely unchanged. All that is needed is a sound dose of common sense, of entrepreneurial spirit, some imagination and the will to succeed!

Ladies and Gentlemen,
Thank You very much.