Medview Airline says it has obtained the necessary permits for the building of infrastructure Maintenance Repair Organization (MRO) and Approved Training Organization (ATO) to serve the region of Africa.
This is part of the airline’s diversification of it services into aviation related matters.
Chairman, Medview airline, Shelk Abdul-Moshen Al- Thunayan in his statement at the Airlines Annual General Meeting in Lagos, Al-Thunayan said the Chinese company, CCECC, had submitted quotation and are keen to actualize this dream on their behalf, adding that in the long term, these diversifications would increase their revenues while also rapidly decreasing long term operating expenses on maintenance.
He urged the shareholders of the company to support and trust them to deliver on these projects.
“Therefore, as we seek to expand our frontiers to tap the profit pools of markets in this part of Africa with our diversification exercise, we ask that you continually support and trust us to deliver”.
While noting that the year 2018 was a challenging one for the airline, the chairman said, the political tension and the extremely tight market liquidity in Nigeria affected the economic growth of the airline.
He also attributed the decline in the revenue of the company in the year under review to the depleted aircraft fleet due to C- check at the early part of 2018 and re protection exercise.
“The performance of the airline was adversely impacted by the partial stagnation in the revenue generation (passenger traffic/cash in- flow) due to the lack of aircraft and high cost of maintenance and improvement items due to foreign exchange fluctuation”.
Al-Thunayan assured that the airline would continue to seek ways to improve services with the addition of the aircraft from C-check.
Financial Highlights
Medview airline chairman observed that despite the strong headwinds that confronted the airline’s revenue throughout 2018, the airline was able to balance itself but recorded a loss after tax of 10.33 billion which was lower than the previous year profit of 1.25 billion.
According to him, ” the operating environment remained highly volatile characterized by lack of infrastructure and foreign currency shortages as the depletion/fluctuation of dollar continued unabated.
He lamented that the industry had remained heavily taxed and had witnessed the issue of double taxation on numerous items unresolved,” even after the government made promises to reduce it. Other airlines are not spared of the adverse impact of these difficult operating conditions”.
Downgrade of staff and Directors
Al-Thunayan also speaking on the downgrade of staff emphasized that it was with a heavy heart that such decision had to be made to keep the airline afloat.
“This was done in 3 trenches where approximately 100 of the work force were laid off pending when the situation of the airline stabilizes. Most of those affected were the crew and out-station staff”.
He promised that when the situation improves the retrenched staff would have priority when it was time for recruitment.
