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Philippine budget carrier also buying 49 Airbuses over 8 yearsSingaporeTHE president and chief executive officer of Cebu Pacific, Lance Gokongwei, has a lot on his plate for the coming year.迷你倉For one thing, the Philippines' top-ranking budget carrier plans to extend its international long-haul flights to Australia and Saudi Arabia and expand on its services to Japan. Secondly, it has ordered brand-new Airbus 330-300s, he told The Business Times in an interview yesterday."This particular period is exciting because we are launching our long-haul services. We've started flying to Dubai, and our plan is to ultimately roll out at least eight new aircraft over the next three or four years," he said.The current fleet stands at 47 aircraft. If the airline's plans to extend its network of destinations are realised, it will double its number of international long-haul flights by the end of next year. He said he sees huge demand at both ends of the market in the long-haul space.The airline is now flying its A330s to Singapore and South Korea, but the "sweet spot" for the A330s lies in longer flights of seven to 10 hours, he said.Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are within that flight radius, and are the top two places where Filipinos are hired and re-hired; going by figures from the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, 259,546 of them are deployed there. He said a key challenge in the airline business lies in managing over-capacity in the industry."You don't know how much capacity your competitors are putting in, so you have to manage the things under your control," he said, citing unit cost and service quality as controllable factors.Cebu Pacific has ordered 49 new aircraft - 30 A321Neo, four A330s and 15 A320s - but these will be paced over an eight-year period to 2021. "So it's not as dramatic as it sounds," he said. Some will be replacement aircraft, as older aircraft are disposed of.Of over-capacity, Mr Gokongwei said: "Now that we are a significant player - with over 50 per cent of the domestic market and 17 per cent of the international market (flying out of the Philippines) - we would create problems for the entire industry, including oursel儲存es, if we expand extremely rapidly from a larger base. So we are trying to pace new aircraft arrival with what we predict growth will be."He said that historically, the Philippine airline industry has been growing by 15 to 16 per cent per year, but from a larger base now, and that constraints in capacity in Manila airport have cropped up. "We think we have to plan for slower growth in the high single-digits."With rapid growth over the past five years, the number of slots available for take-offs and landings at the Manila airport is now limited; already, no more slots are available between 7am and 7pm. "Our advantage is that as the single largest airline, we already control the largest number of slots in Manila. There are opportunities to improve slot utilisation by using larger aircraft and by using the slots for international flights rather than just domestic flights," he said.Other solutions include building more traffic after 7pm or before 7am, and creating more hubs outside Manila. The airline now has six hubs for flights out of the Philippines, and growth is limited to perhaps another two, he said. "The right thing to do is to increase the density in an operating hub, rather than introduce new ones, so that will be our focus," he added.Ironically, his view is that competition among airlines in the Philippines has shrunk; the number of major players now stands at four, the other three being the Philippine Airlines group, the AirAsia Zest venture and the Tiger SeAir venture.Asked why Cebu Pacific was turning to the long-haul segment, he replied: "We have done a good job building the brand domestically, then regionally, so the next challenge is building the long-haul market. "We recognise that we are a point-to-point carrier, so our focus is to build that point-to-point traffic between hubs which have a heavy concentration of Filipinos, particularly in Saudi Arabia and the UAE."The carrier's Manila-Dubai flight was the first such direct flight for a Philippine carrier in 15 years. To tap the Japan market now under-served by low- cost carriers, Cebu Pacific plans to offer daily Manila-Osaka-Manila flights from next month, up from thrice-weekly flights now.mini storage