Figures reveal little of meaning and plenty of gaps (380 words)

Published: 7/9/2001

Siberia Airlines (Sibir) has released first quarter figures for the year. While consolidating the activities of Vnukovo for the first half of 2001 in its preliminary operating result, the company has failed to produce comparable details for the same period in 2000, so rendering the H12001 figure superficially impressive, but difficult to interpret. According to Gleb Osokin, spokesman for Sibir, the first half growth for the two companies combined was primarily attributable to the addition of the VAL routes and, secondly, to new Sibir routes. It was interesting to note that the newly merged carrier was referred to as Sibir, suggesting that the issue of the name for the new carrier may have already been resolved. Sibir and Vnukovo Airlines together carried 672,000 passengers in 1H2001, compared with Sibir's 320,000 passengers in the first half of 2000. The joint airlines carried 43% more cargo, totalling 5430 tonnes. Even more meaningless is the statistic relating to time spent by aircraft in theair that, perhaps predictably, rose by 62.4% over Sibir-only data for 1H2000. It is difficult to make any real sense of this data given the lack of comparable figures. It is erroneous, however, to conclude that the upside was largely attributable to VAL's inclusion. Osokin, while refusing to provide the comparable data, did concede that Sibir, on its own, would have rated second behind Aeroflot in terms of revenue passengers kilometres (RPK), suggesting a more than reasonable performance given the airline's flight mix, compared with, say, Transaero. With this in mind, Osokin's comments make Sibir's reluctance to disclose the figures all the more difficult to interpret and immediately prompts suspicion, even to the casual observer, that it has something to hide. This is most likely to be the traffic performance of VAL, which was lacklustre even in the first eight months of 2000, growing only 10%, despite a very strong August, when traffic was up by almost 35% on the previous year. Sibir's first quarter 2001 also delivered a whopping 29% increase, to 184,783 passengers in the slowest market period, suggesting again that, if it was sustained into the second half of 2001, then the collapse in VAL's passenger numbers was dramatic.

Article ID: 2632