Indigo Airways Success Story
yINDIGO AIRLINE
How India 's youngest airline became the largest
.
Reticent and low-profile are not the usual personality traits of a CEO in a high-profile business like aviation. Image: Aditya Ghosh
But Aditya Ghosh, 37, has defied convention in many ways. His regular office wear is T-shirt with jeans, he doesn 't have a B-school degree and before joining IndiGo, he was a lawyer at J Sagar.
Ghosh has justified his aversion for the spotlight by saying that people don 't fly IndiGo because they know the president of the company.
So his reaction to the six-year-old IndiGo taking a giant leap to become India 's largest airline in July was just an one-liner: The airline, he said, never chased market share, but being the largest in the world 's largest democracy is humbling.
Like its President, IndiGo also seems to prefer its performance to do all the talking and has stuck to the basics.
Example: Till sometime back, the airline didn 't advertise and preferred to bank on word of mouth publicity to its signature cocktail of on-time performance, clean aircraft, good onboard service and of course, low fares.
The result: higher aircraft utilisation (an average of 11.5 hours per plane everyday) and quicker turnaround time (about 30 minutes).
"IndiGo has not raised market expectations to the level it can 't meet. Also, the airline has stuck to its business plan.
Its operating philosophy is simple – on-time performance and affordable fares. For them the "low cost philosophy" has been there since its inception and is not a corporate strategy introduced at the time of slowdown," says Captain Shakti Lumba, former head of operations of IndiGo.
Analysts aver the July performance (its market share was 27 per cent compared to Jet ' 26.6 per cent) is no flash in the pan.
"I expect the gap in terms of market share and profitability between IndiGo and the rest to widen at least in the near term," says Kapil Kaul, chief executive officer at aviation consulting
How India 's youngest airline became the largest
.
Reticent and low-profile are not the usual personality traits of a CEO in a high-profile business like aviation. Image: Aditya Ghosh
But Aditya Ghosh, 37, has defied convention in many ways. His regular office wear is T-shirt with jeans, he doesn 't have a B-school degree and before joining IndiGo, he was a lawyer at J Sagar.
Ghosh has justified his aversion for the spotlight by saying that people don 't fly IndiGo because they know the president of the company.
So his reaction to the six-year-old IndiGo taking a giant leap to become India 's largest airline in July was just an one-liner: The airline, he said, never chased market share, but being the largest in the world 's largest democracy is humbling.
Like its President, IndiGo also seems to prefer its performance to do all the talking and has stuck to the basics.
Example: Till sometime back, the airline didn 't advertise and preferred to bank on word of mouth publicity to its signature cocktail of on-time performance, clean aircraft, good onboard service and of course, low fares.
The result: higher aircraft utilisation (an average of 11.5 hours per plane everyday) and quicker turnaround time (about 30 minutes).
"IndiGo has not raised market expectations to the level it can 't meet. Also, the airline has stuck to its business plan.
Its operating philosophy is simple – on-time performance and affordable fares. For them the "low cost philosophy" has been there since its inception and is not a corporate strategy introduced at the time of slowdown," says Captain Shakti Lumba, former head of operations of IndiGo.
Analysts aver the July performance (its market share was 27 per cent compared to Jet ' 26.6 per cent) is no flash in the pan.
"I expect the gap in terms of market share and profitability between IndiGo and the rest to widen at least in the near term," says Kapil Kaul, chief executive officer at aviation consulting