Qantas Airline's Strategic Response to Emirates-Malaysia Agreement

The report examines the strategies of Qantas Airline in response to the collaboration of Emirates and Malaysia airlines. The goal is to achieve a competitive position in the market by framing and implementing strategies of covering most of the customers of different cultural background travelling across European and Asian countries irrespective of national and international boundaries.

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Strategic Thinking Concept and Tools
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Executive summery
The report examines the strategies of Qantas Airline in response to the collaboration of
Emirates and Malaysia airlines. The goal is to achieve a competitive position in the market by
framing and implementing strategies of covering most of the customers of different cultural
background travelling across European and Asian countries irrespective of national and
international boundaries.

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
Discussion..................................................................................................................................3
Emirates-Malaysia Agreement and its outcome....................................................................3
Strategy of Qantas airline.......................................................................................................4
Execution of strategy..................................................................................................................5
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................5

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Introduction
The report aims to present an analysis and evaluate Qantas airline’s group strategy
and its execution as Malaysia and Emirates Airlines have signed an agreement to expand their
business forward as partners. They have opted for such a joint venture to provide their
customers a wide international network within their range and high-class international travel
experience, which has interlinked Malaysia to more than 90 locations of Middle East, Europe,
America and Africa in collaboration Emirates Airlines. Therefore, the purpose of this report
is to analyse and evaluate credibility of Qantas airline’s strategic approach to the market in
order to gain competitive advantage over the joint venture of Emirates and Malaysia airlines.
Discussion
Emirates-Malaysia Agreement and its outcome
Malaysia and Emirates airline decided to take their business forward by signing an
agreement of serving international experience together to the customers. Companies by
opting for such joint ventures enable the customers to have a world-class travel experience
covering no less than 90 destinations across Europe, middle-east, America and Africa
(Squalli 2014). As a result of this collaboration, Malaysia is committed to add their codes on
flights of Emirates covering destinations of Europe, America and simultaneously, Emirates
will add their code of domestic flights in Malaysia and South- eastern part of Asia.
Expectation is Malaysian customers would access several international destinations from
America, Europe and Middle East whereas customers of Emirates can gather experience of
travelling across Asia-pacific network (Suki 2014). Undoubtedly, it will decrease hazards for
the customers as they can avail seamless options under one roof. The purpose of this joint
venture was to boost the balance sheet for both the companies by integrating the customers

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over the purpose of professional or personal business. This has increased the overseas market
of tourism in Malaysian countries in recent times.
Strategy of Qantas airline
According to Ashwini Nand, Singh and Power (2013), Qantas, being the favourite
Airline of Australia has been operating across the traditional European and American routes
and Jetstar being the low cost brother airline of Qantas has now started to cover routes across
Asian countries as Qantas started to receive competition from their own production. Qantas
has been maintaining a successful multi brand strategy ensuring almost 80% of share in
Australian market other than Virgin Australia. Although with such high market share, Qantas
should have an immense competitive edge in the market yet as far as international market is
concerned Qantas is having a hard time operating under such environment due to presence of
high competition. At this very moment, when the agreement of Emirates and Malaysian
Airline came in front, in order to combat the threat of new entries Qantas felt to make an
approach strategically by joining the hands of Tourism Australia. As the name of the airline
has now attach with the national tourism interest Qantas expected that its result would glorify
their brand image.
Considering the agreement, Qantas has decided to mitigate their long-term internal
issues of price fixing and their inability to cover international destinations as compared to
other eminent airlines (Homsombat, Lei and Fu 2014). Therefore, strategic collaboration with
Australian tourism may help to uplift their position in the market. As they have Jetstar as
their low cost carrier covering Asian countries, opportunity is customers prefer low cost
travels in larger proportion whereas Emirates and Malaysia promise to serve excellent
travelling experience. There is no doubt, as described in Pearson et al. (2015), service wise
their joint venture can handle premium customers better, still the budget friendly approach of
Qantas’ low cost carrier combined with Qantas high class service will help them to lead the

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market in near future. Otherwise, Qantas can also share codes of flight with other
international airline brand to remain competitive.
Execution of strategy
Both the domestic venture of Qantas and Jetstar remains successful whereas, Jetstar
has made immense progress with the strategy of coving pan Asian countries. When they
started to operate the market locally collaborating with local partners. The market share
received a hike as they launched Jetstar Japan and simultaneously, Jetstar Pacific collaborated
with Vietnam Airways. Following the trend of low cost carrier yet providing premium
experience collaborating with Tourism Australia, Qantas Airline is trying to cover as many
Asian destinations as possible maintaining the traditional routes at the same time (Zhang et
al. 2017).
Conclusion
Globalization has its impact over every business industry. As the purpose of airlines is
to connect people from one location to another, in order to remain competitive, airlines are
trying to cover maximum number of destinations. In response to the collaboration of Emirates
and Malaysia, Qantas has executed their marketing strategies well. It can be concluded after
evaluating the strategic approach of the company that ventures and initiatives were smart and
apt according to crisis. This report can work guideline to resolve competition issues in future
within this industry.

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References
Ashwini Nand, A., Singh, P.J. and Power, D., 2013. Testing an integrated model of
operations capabilities: an empirical study of Australian airlines. International Journal of
Operations & Production Management, 33(7), pp.887-911.
Homsombat, W., Lei, Z. and Fu, X., 2014. Competitive effects of the airlines-within-airlines
strategy–Pricing and route entry patterns. Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and
Transportation Review, 63, pp.1-16.
Pearson, J., O'Connell, J.F., Pitfield, D. and Ryley, T., 2015. The strategic capability of Asian
network airlines to compete with low-cost carriers. Journal of air transport management, 47,
pp.1-10.
Squalli, J., 2014. Airline passenger traffic openness and the performance of Emirates
Airline. The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, 54(1), pp.138-145.
Suki, N.M., 2014. Passenger satisfaction with airline service quality in Malaysia: A structural
equation modeling approach. Research in transportation business & management, 10, pp.26-
32.
Zhang, A., Hanaoka, S., Inamura, H. and Ishikura, T., 2017. Low-cost carriers in Asia:
Deregulation, regional liberalization and secondary airports. In Low Cost Carriers (pp. 55-
69). Routledge.