How Ajay Singh is restructuring SpiceJet after takeover

A: Ajay is obviously looking at every aspect of the business. He is already looking at all of the strategy, the returns, the costs, so on and so forth.

We will be back to 26 Boeings and 15 Q400s in the summer schedule starting in April and then we intend to grow back rapidly thereafter. We are going to be rationalising some stations in the summer schedule because with fewer aircraft, you can’t spread yourself too thin. You need to again have more depth than breadth.

Q: Time and again we have seen reports on the attrition that is taking place and the staff rationalisation plan that is under works at this point. Give us a sense of where you started at and what would be the total staff at the end of this year. Also take us through the process of furloughs that is unfolding at SpiceJet at this point.

A: Well, the staff ratio that LCCs in this part of the world should aspire should be below 100 but we want to bring the number down to below 100 per aircraft. I don’t want to go into more specific than that.

A large part of the right sizing has occurred on its own actually, naturally due to attrition. So that has actually taken care of the chunk of the reductions and any further reductions that had acquired as we have mentioned in the past will be done as fairly as possible and will be done on the furlough concept, which is that those staff we will hire back once we start growing again.