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Economy and Finance

Economy and Finance

What does the future hold for the largest airline of Asia?

07 Oct 2023 Zinkpot 246
What does the future hold for the largest airline of Asia?
  1. India is currently home to 39 airlines including scheduled, regional, chartered, and cargo airlines, IndiGo being one of them.
  2. IndiGo is not only the largest airline in India, but in Asia. The total fleet of IndiGo currently stands at 319 aircraft. This ever-growing fleet is key to the growth of aviation in India and to cater to millions of passengers every year.
  3. IndiGo is arguably one of the biggest startup stories that have come out of India over the past couple of decades. One fine day in 2005, Rahul Bhatia and Rakesh Gangwal, co-founders of IndiGo, signed up to order 100 Airbus A320 aircraft at the Paris Airshow. A previously unheard-of entity signed up for such a big aircraft deal and then went on to collect all its aircraft.
  4. Seventeen years later, IndiGo is one of the largest customers of Airbus and the largest airline in India by fleet and market share.
  5. IndiGo made the headlines during the 2023 edition of the Paris Air Show as they placed the largest order in the history of aviation, an order of 125 Airbus A320neo and 375 Airbus A321neo totalling up to $50 billion and taking the delivery backlog to almost 1000 aircraft.
  6. Indigo’s passenger share amounts to a huge 60% in the Indian aviation market. It serves 78 destinations within the country with more than 1800 flights daily.
  7. The airline is rushing to expand into new international markets. IndiGo used to operate to 25 international destinations at the end of June 2022 and is now on track to take that number up to 32 very soon. 
  8. In August 2023, IndiGo launched flights between Mumbai and Nairobi, and Jakarta. From Delhi, IndiGo has launched flights to Tbilisi, Georgia, and Baku, Azerbaijan. In September, IndiGo heads to Tashkent and Almaty in Kazakhstan. In many cases, no Indian carrier operates to these destinations.
  9. IndiGo is not just building these routes for Indian travelers to these countries, but in some cases, also offering Indian airports as transit hubs for connecting traffic. For instance, there is no direct connectivity between Tbilisi and Bangkok and IndiGo is now offering one of the shortest connections between the two stations via Delhi.
  10. Besides its own aircraft, IndiGo has recently wet-leased two Boeing 777 aircraft from Turkish Airlines and operates Delhi-Istanbul and Mumbai-Istanbul segments with these aircraft.
  11. IndiGo has also taken to sell code-share flights on Turkish Airlines, allowing IndiGo to sell its customers the option to buy a ticket to destinations it does not operate on its own for now, such as those in Western Europe.
  12. Moreover, it has also recently announced a move to launch a venture capital fund, borrowing the concept from Airbus and JetBlue, some of the other aviation companies that run such funds.
  13. IndiGo posted a profit of $372 million in the June quarter, a jump of almost 30% compared to the previous quarter. Compared to the same period in 2022, this year, IndiGo reported an 18.8% capacity increase to 32.7 billion available seat kilometers and the passengers’ numbers increased to 26.2 million up by 30%.
  14. Being the fastest-growing airline in the most populous nation in the world, IndiGo is now facing mighty competition from Tata Group-backed, Air India. But with almost 1000 aircraft on order and spiraling demand for seats per sector, IndiGo has a bright future ahead.

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