Ethiopian Review

By Kirubel Tadesse

Ethiopian Airlines has awarded Boeing 787 Stimulator design contract to the Construction Design Share Company.
Girma Wake, CEO of the airline told Parliament last Wednesday that despite the aviation industry’s huge losses, Ethiopian has maintained a strong performance and profits. The airline is also investing in the company and hopes to shortly sign a deal to have a new hangar built.
The Dreamliner simulator design contract, estimated to be worth 34 million birr, is one of the airline’s capital investments it made during the first eight months of the budget year. According to Kassim Gressu, Ethiopian’s Executive Vice President of Finance and Strategic Planning, who accompanied Girma to parliament, the design is already underway.
The contract is expected to be followed with the stimulator planting, a part of the 2005 Ethiopian purchase of ten 787-8 Dreamliner aircraft for a total value of 1.3 billion dollars. The deal secured, which was appreciated as one of the best deals for the industry, allows partners Ethiopian, Boeing and ALTION to work together on the stimulator project, estimated to cost up to 15 million dollars.
The airline industry suffered a loss of 8.5 billion dollars in 2008. This year is also expected to hammer the industry, with nearly five billion dollars of losses.
“Even in war times, everyone is not a casualty” said Ethiopian CEO Girma, who explained to parliament his airlines has pocketed a net profit of 857 million birr from the first eight months of operations.
The airline’s eight months performance report submitted to parliament’s Infrastructure Development Affairs Standing committee details that Ethiopian carried 1.95 million passengers in the accounted period, a 16 per cent boost compared to last year.
Wining a huge number of passengers when travellers are discouraged by the global economic slowdown was not easy, Girma explained: “One factor that helped us was that our passengers are not mainly tourists, but are rather African businessmen.
“It is a must for them to travel to do business, as business transactions on the continent are yet to go online.
“Capitalising on this factor, we devised a new approach to offer them a very convenient arrival and departure time, which helped us to keep our passengers.”
“One airlines’ strength is always tested by how much it can adapt to new challenges, we can adopt and do that,” Girma responded to members of the committee who asked how the flag carrier’s performance bucked the global trend.
Consistent with it passengers number boost is a more staggering advance in freight, which showed 80 per cent growth to put the eight month revenues at 8.37 billion birr.
In the first half of the fiscal year it generated 6.7 billion birr in operating revenues with a net profit of 515 million birr. Now, in more good news for the airlines, official data is predicting the last four months will produce a record profit for the budget year.

(Capital)