Bradley Perrett covered China, Japan, South Korea and Australia. He is a Mandarin-speaking Australian.
Before joining Aviation Week in 2006 he was a macroeconomics, politics and aerospace journalist with Reuters. Perrett holds a bachelor’s degree in law from Macquarie University, Sydney. He left Aviation Week in 2020.
AirAsia Bhd. is proving that the budget model is as resilient in Southeast Asia as elsewhere, with the Malaysian airline reporting a second-quarter net profit of 139.2 million ringgit (US$39.7 million), supported almost entirely by a healthy operating result. While Asian network carriers have achieved profits only because of one-time gains such as forex revaluations and government handouts, AirAsia Bhd, the core company in the AirAsia group, achieved a core operating profit of 128 million ringgit, up from 30 million ringgit a year before.
South Korea’s two main airlines made profits only because of one-time gains in the second quarter. Korean Air made a profit thanks to foreign exchange gains in the second quarter, but lost money on operations. The operating loss for the airline, the world’s largest cargo carrier, worsened slightly to 127.3 billion won from 116.4 billion won a year before as sales fell 16% to 2.07 trillion won.
The Chinese airline industry is likely to maintain an extraordinary pace of expansion for the rest of this year after posting figures that show it rapidly recovering ground lost in 2008.
