Advance08: Tony Fernandes - Group CEO, AirAsia

Tony Fernandes - Group CEO, AirAsia

Tony used to work for Time Warner and resigned on the spot when the AOL merger was proposed. Saw a commercial on TV in London for ezjet and decided at that point to start something similar in Asia - he had no experience at all.

AirAsia History

• initially an existing airline that had 2 airlines
• Tony inherited $6million in debt.
• use the name as the logo
• 6 years later they have 75 aircraft and transporting 2million passengers a month and have ordered 175 new aircraft
• SARS, bird flu, tsunami, earthquakes and more - always found a way out of the problems

Oil is $129 - Tony jokes that they’re hoping to find a way to power planes on coconuts. On a more serious note they are now generating about 80% of their sales online.

AirAsia is the most profitable airline in the world today and have won many awards - FastCompany stated AirAsia is one of the innovative companies in the world.

AirAsia has 1-2 routes making it the most dense network in South East Asia. They do 12 flights a day to Macau- previously there were no flights to Macau.

They have used a lot of technology to level the competition - e-coupons and online booking and have set a strategic partnership with Microsoft.

The focus of his talk today is about the people. They have worked hard to give incentives and support their employees. There is a focus on togetherness and community. They make the pilots help clean aircraft and cook breakfast for engineers from time to time. This fosters a team effort. Started AirAsia academy to train and launch new employees en mass. Any excuse to have a party is the way of life at AirAsia. AirAsia allows people with great attitude and multiple talents to thrive. Tony feels his job is to polish his diamonds (people). The hanger is dedicated to AirAsia engineers. Tony asked the guy that built his house to build his airplane hanger. Then they put a giant poster of his engineers that says “AirAsia has the best engineers” on the side of the hanger - that side of the hanger points at Malaysian Airlines - Maylaysian Airlines can’t complain because those engineers were trained by them - funny stuff.

Anybody can live their dreams at AirAsia.

Tony’s presentation today has been absolutely inspiring.

The downside of live blogging is that you can’t really capture the jokes and the personality of the speaker. Tony Fernandes is an exceptional speaker. If you ever get a chance to see him speak don’t pass it up.