Qantas Business Report Essay

On October 22nd, 2001, the Industrial dispute between QANTAS and its employees was initiated with the offering of a new Enterprise Bargaining Agreement. This proposed an 18-month wage freeze for employees plus a sliding scale profit share scheme. Ten out of twelve unions under QANTAS accepted the terms of the agreement, barring the unions of manufacturing employees (AWU and AMWU). They were holding out for a 4-6% pay rise. On the 8th May 2002, some ten months later, the dispute was resolved when QANTAS agreed to an across the board 6% pay increase. This essay provides an in-depth analysis into the dispute, including causes, the resolution process, the role of stakeholders, and costs and benefits for all concerned.

The main focus of this report is to identify the legal classification, the characteristics, the life cycle stage of Qantas and one internal and external stakeholder that is affected by the activates of Qantas. The legal classification describes that Qantas is a public company and has changed its legal classification in the growth and maturity stages of the business life cycle. The characteristics of Qantas talks about the company's industrial classification and sector classification. The business life cycle is explained and gives reason why Qantas is in the renewal stage of post maturity. There is also description of one internal and external

1) Qantas Airways Limited is the national airline of Australia, it is also the largest airline in Australia. The Qantas Group’s principal business is providing domestic and international air transport services for passengers. Additionally, Qantas owns several subsidiary companies such as Jetstar and QantasLink that also operates flights to domestic and international locations, and Q Catering, a premium full service flight caterer.

Rivalry among industry competitors has caused attention to be focused on tariff levels. Airfare prices were at an all time low in 2009. This suggested a strong competitive rivalry based on price differentiation. This price differentiation will cause a dramatic loss in revenue if these prices continue to drop and this would lead to a reduced competitiveness. In an effort to safeguard revenue and reduce expenditure, Qantas has developed a strategy to deal with a change in the external competitive environment. .

This method involves selling products below production cost. This attracts customers to the business, who then purchase other products. Ultimately, this improves profits, brand loyalty, and market share. Qantas has used this strategy during the launch of its subsidiary, Jetstar, in 2006. For example, flights from Melbourne to Sydney was offered at $19. These low airfares attracted customers away from its competitors, such as Virgin Blue. This had seen

Qantas’ financial performance has been very successful in recent years with the business recovering strongly from GFC and a large decrease in revenue to ear 377 million in 2010. The effective financial performance has been the result of effective profitability, liquidity, efficiency, return on capital, good solvency and growth including the establishment of a new airline (jet star).

By outsourcing, Qantas is able to significantly reduce costs and maintain it’s competitive advantage. However this advantage also has a draw back, hundreds of engineers have also been cut from their jobs and have had their jobs given to people overseas. This puts a bad reputation on the name of the business as an Australian business will cut jobs from Australian workers and supple foreign workers with jobs. Families and friends of these workers may feel resentment towards Qantas and choose to travel with another airline instead resulting in a loss of customers. This strategy has been effective in reducing cost but has resulted in a reduction of quality and safety and led to a decreased business reputation resulting in a loss of customers and stakeholders.

Qantas’ main weaknesses come from the high risk nature of airlines (possibility of crashes and large scale incidents), the complexity of the aircraft they buy which could lead to costs of re-training pilots to fly that particular aircraft and may lead to higher labour and the recent string of incidents have undoubtedly hindered Qantas’ image. One of the most recent incidents occurred while a reasonably new Qantas A380 was flying from Singapore to Sydney when it experienced engine and hydraulic problems forcing it to hastily turn back and make an emergency landing in Singapore. This

These main business objectives help the airline to focus on deliver quality services of the customers. Qantas main business is passengers transports and it is the world’s second oldest airlines. Qantas group operates approx 5600 flights in a weak in 59 cities of regional areas. Internationally, the group operates around 970 flights (Qantas-630 and Jetstar-340) in 44 counties 182 destinations. Moreover, through operations the group focused on five key elements that are right aircraft or right

Domestic market Virgin Australia, including Tiger Australia (Virgin owns 60% of Tiger now), occupies 35% of the domestic market share in Australia, and its major competitor Qantas, including its subsidiary Jetstar, accounts for a majority of 61% of the domestic market share in January 2014.Qantas (QF) has grown by 18% over 5 years (Jan 2008 vs. Jan 2014) while Virgin Australia

The weakness of Qantas lies in the management and their lack of investment in their employees. The management weakness can be seen in many of the financial and operational issues. Qantas faces several Industrial disputes which the company’s competitors do not experience. These issues affect the interior structure and the external opportunities to gain new customers. This also makes this their biggest

Australis’s largest Airline, Qantas, serves both international and domestic air flights, has over 8200 flights every week with 33,600 employees and 8 million

QANTAS operates an average of 450 domestic flights daily and around 540 international flights every week,

Combined, Qantas along Emirates offer 98 weekly routes between Dubai and Australia. This deal improved Qantas’ profit before tax with an increase of 80/90 million A$ in 2012/2013 while projecting an increase of around 400 million A$ in the financial year 2013/2014 according to an analyst at Macquarie (Joyce, 2013). This alliance surpassed the existing partnership - Etihad Airways/Virgin Australia which covers only 30 European routes (Varley, 2013). Ultimately, the alliance helped divert capital resources from Europe to

Before the alliance, Qantas had an alliance with British airways and in 2004 they held 3% of the market share but in 2013 they were not to be seen as one of the top market sharers. Also, as shown in figure 3, in 2006 Emirates had joined the Australian market first than the other two gulf carriers and had an outstanding amount of 630,000 seats to Australia. While Emirates was making a big impact in Australian market, Etihad joined in 2007 right after Emirates, however they were not as successful as Emirates. Etihad gradually gained passengers and in 2009 when Qatar airways joined, they had approximately 290,000 passengers. By the end of 2015 Etihad had the same number of seats to Australia as Emirates had in 2005 and Qatar Airways was even smaller. As shown from figure 3, Qatar Airways had Etihad’s 2008/2009 seats to Australia in 2015. (CAPA,2015). Although Qantas still remains with the most market share in Australia, Emirates is showing its capabilities to dominate the Australian market.