Guidaviaggi riporta in modo che crea confusione.
Qantas e Virgin Atlantic vogliono fondersi, ma con altri vettori e non una con l' altra.
Wednesday June 9, 2010
Qantas, Virgin Open to Bids as Industry Consolidates
June 08, 2010, 11:58 AM EDT
By Steven Rothwell and Cornelius Rahn
June 8 (Bloomberg) -- Qantas Airways Ltd. and Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd. said they’re open to merger proposals as efforts to cut costs and boost traffic push carriers to combine.
Qantas, Australia’s biggest airline, favors an inter-continental deal and would be “a great asset for anyone,” Chief Executive Officer Alan Joyce said in an interview. Virgin is exploring options as U.S. and European mergers squeeze its position in the North Atlantic market, CEO Steve Ridgway said.
“Consolidation isn’t easy to do and cross-border inter-continental mergers have not occurred yet, but I think they will and Qantas will be at the forefront of that,” Joyce said in Berlin, adding that the process “will take some time.”
Joyce didn’t say if he favored a combination with British Airways Plc, which held merger talks with Qantas in 2008 before agreeing to a deal with Iberia Lineas Aereas de Espana SA. Virgin, British Airways’s biggest competitor at London’s Heathrow airport, is reviewing its standalone stance after regulators said they’d approve an expanded alliance between its rival and AMR Corp.’s American Airlines and after United Airlines agreed to combine with Continental Airlines Inc.
“We’re a small company still,” Ridgway said in an interview in Berlin where, like Joyce, he was attending the annual meeting of the International Air Transport Association. “We would be looking potentially just to grow ourselves, to become part of a bigger group. We just need to look at what happens in the industry over the next 18 months.”
