India’s largest passenger carrier IndiGo lost market share for the second consecutive month as its market share slipped marginally to 28.2% in December 2013 as compared to 28.6% in the previous month. And clambering back to the second spot in December was low-cost carrier SpiceJet with a 19.1% market share, which it shared with Jet Airways, which reported a market share of 19.1% in December. However, when combined with JetLite, the Jet Airways Group was the second-largest airline with 24.6% market share, courtesy Jet-Lite’s 5.5% share. GoAir, which was the largest gainer in November 2013, kept its market share at 8.8% during December, while Air India’s share fell marginally to 19%.
Market leader in India, and also the most profitable airline, IndiGo’s declining share for the second successive issue was not a serious issue. The month of December also brought some cheer to the airlines. More passengers flew in December 2013, than they did in the same month of the previous year.
Overall, domestic airlines carried 55.86 lakh passengers or 3.37% more, during December 2013 as compared to the same month last year. During the full calendar year 2013, airlines carried 6.14 crore passengers or 4.43% more than the previous calendar year. Apart from Air India’s slight drop in market share, the greater concern was its on-time performance during December 2013. After achieving 82% on-time performance from top six metros in the first half of the 2013-14 fiscal, the airline’s on-time performance at top six metros during December was the lowest at 69.8%. The airline is preparing to join Star Alliance over the summer.
In terms of on-time performance, SpiceJet, which is chasing the more lucrative corporate clientele, achieved the best performance in December 2013, with 82.2% of its flights operating on schedule from the top six metros. With a total score of 82.2% of flights on-time, SpiceJet was at the top of the list on the parameter of on-time performance (OTP) for December 2013.
On-time performance of scheduled domestic airlines is computed by the DGCA for six metro airports — Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Mumbai. There was also good news for airlines in terms of load factors. All airlines improved over November 2013, but the leader of the pack in December was JetLite, which was flying its planes 78.5% full.
Air India’s flights were also operating more than three quarters full with 77.3% load factors during the month. IndiGo’s flights were marginally less full than Air India’s as the low-cost carrier had 77.1% load factor.
Regional carrier Air Costa, which is based out of Hyderabad, was the surprise of the month. The carrier, which struggled to fill its planes even by half during the first two months of operations, had load factors of 72.6% during December 2013.
During the calendar year, Air India also managed to eat into a portion of the private carrier’s market with a 10.46% growth over the number of passengers carried last year. Air India carried 119.09 lakh domestic passengers in 2013.
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