IndiGo flies past Kingfisher

Vijay Mallya’s cash-strapped Kingfisher has lost its number two position from the Indian skies. According to latest DGCA figures, low-cost carrier IndiGo had a market share of 19.6% in the domestic market in October and Kingfisher’s share fell by almost two points to 16.7% — just 0.1% ahead of Air India’s 16.6% domestic share. Naresh Goyal’s Jet-Jet-Lite combine remained the market leader with a combined share of 24.8%. However, as an individual airline IndiGo’s market share of 19.6% was higher than Jet Airways’ 17.6%, which when added to JetLite’s 7.2% makes Goyal the market leader in October. Mallya earlier used to maintain that Kingfisher was the biggest domestic airline as its market share was ahead of Jet on an airline-to-airline basis. JetLite, he always reasoned, was another carrier with a different carrier flying on a different airline operator permit and adding Jet and JetLite figures to term them India’s market leader was not correct. In the past few months, IndiGo and Kingfisher had been almost neck-to-neck with both enjoying about 18% market share and occupying the number two slot. But with IndiGo adding planes to its fleet and flying at very high occupancies, it has now surpassed Kingfisher which is cutting flights.