We target profitability, not market share: Akasa Air CFO

The country's newest airline Akasa Air, which began its commercial operations in August 2022, recently added its 28th destination - Darbhanga, Bihar (23 domestic and 5 international cities). The airline has served over 17 million passengers since its launch. On the sidelines of the recently held SAP NOW AI Tour in Mumbai, the airline's chief financial officer Ankur Goel told Uma Kannan that they are focused on creating a good solid business and are targeting profitability. Edited excerpts:

What is your expansion plan in this fiscal year FY26?

It is the same plan that we had last year and the same we will have four years later, and it is to chase profitability. India as a country is underserved and it requires a lot more capacity to come in and that's what we are focused on. As we continue to add capacity, we will continue to augment some of the cities that we have. Navi Mumbai is going to open up this year and so is the Jewar Airport. We would want to fly to those cities as well and beyond that there will be other cities that we continue to evaluate.

What about your plans for international expansion?

We believe that international for us is here to stay and that it is just far more profitable than domestic when we look at the numbers overall. In fact, 16% of our capacity today is international and it will organically grow because we are chasing markets that are profitable and underserved. So, you will see some cities adding to our capacity. Over the next three-four years, the number could be as high as 40% for international and the rest for domestic.

Your deliveries fell short of expectation in FY25. How many new planes are you expecting to deliver in FY26?

We don't focus on the shell count. There are multiple ways to generate capacity. You can add capacity by flying your planes more and you can generate capacity by flying your planes longer. The focus for us is not how many planes are coming in, our focus is on how much capacity is getting added. So, in FY26 we should be one-third bigger compared to what we are today. We should roughly add 35% additional capacity in FY26 compared to FY25.

How are you looking at the competition? Any plans to increase the market share which is around 4-5%?

I don't know what the number is, we don't even track that number because that number is no indicator of success or profitability. People tell us that the number is around 5%. We are focused on creating a strong sustainable airline. Market share will just be an output. The last thing we would want is to have 100% of the market and 0% on the profit. So, profitability is something we are targeting. We are here to get a good solid business in which customers are happy flying with us.

Market share becomes more relevant in mature markets. When India's market itself is growing at 20-25% year-on-year, the pie is expanding so much that we just don't have enough airlines and enough aircraft to take that pie. So, the question of market share just does not arise right now.

Where do you want the airline to be in terms of growth in the next five years?

I hope that you find things absolutely the same. We want to be an extremely boring airline, which means that the level of service that you expect from Akasa today should remain the same. The fact that we scale up should not mean that you got bad quality seats, bad quality products and food. For all of that internally we need to scale up and that means that every single thing that we are doing has to be significantly better so that as a customer you continue to get the same experience that you expect from Akasa which is where the technology comes in for us.

As a customer you don't care whether we have got one aircraft or 100 aircraft. You just want to reach from point A to point B on time. So, from a customer perspective, I hope that the experience remains very similar, though one thing that is going to happen is that as the customer's expectations change, we want to be that airline that meets the customer's expectations.