Jet Airways is in talks with various banks to raise about $200-300 million of working capital.
MUMBAI: Jet Airways is in talks with various banks to raise about $200-300 million of working capital.
Senior officials of the Mumbai-based airline said this during a conference call with analysts. More details were not revealed.
Jet Airways is also expecting the traditionally travel-heavy third quarter to be better in terms of numbers for the airline. Jet’s results for Q2 this year had shown a huge loss of $77 million or Rs 384.5 crore.
KG Vishwanath, senior general manager, Jet Airways, said, “We have been talking to a few banks for $200-$300 million of working capital.” The airline will continue its capacity reduction plans by not renewing leases of three Boeing 737 aircraft, he added. The leases on these aircraft will expire later this year.
Recently, top airline officials, including Jet’s chief operating officer, Sudheer Raghavan, had said banks were jittery about issuing credit to the airline sector which has been going through a major crisis.
Due to these complaints, union minister for civil aviation, Praful Patel, had promised to take up the matter with the finance minister and various banks.
With crude hovering around $63 a barrel, Vishwanath also said the airline plans to start
hedging the commodity. He refused to divulge details on the airline’s hedging strategy.
During the analyst call, Wolfgang Prock-Schauer, chief executive officer, said Jet’s decision to halt international flights from Amritsar and also to stop flying to San Francisco would help halve its losses from international operations to $30 million.
At present, the only international sectors showing a profit for Jet are the Southeast Asian and the Saarc sectors.
The airline also said revenues from the corporate traffic have remained steady. Currently, around one third of Jet’s revenues come as a result of corporate tie-ups. This, officials said, has remained steady over the recent past. Prock-Schauer added: “Corporate travel in India could remain stable in contrast to other countries of the world.”
The Jet management refused to give more details of the recently-forged alliance with Kingfisher Airlines, saying that the particulars were still being ironed out.
n_john@dnaindia.net 
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