Transforming Air India ‘definitely not going to be a walk in the park’: SIA chief Goh Choon Phong
Singapore Airlines is playing a ‘long game’, he adds
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[SINGAPORE] Singapore Airlines’ ( SIA ) investment in Air India is “a long game”, said SIA CEO Goh Choon Phong, even as the associated company racked up S$3.8 billion of losses in the latest financial year.
The process of transforming Air India is “definitely not going to be a walk in the park”, he noted at SIA’s FY2026 earnings briefing on Friday (May 15). The Singapore group is standing by the Indian carrier, he added.
SIA holds a 25.1 per cent stake in the Indian joint venture airline, whose majority shareholder is Indian company Tata Sons.
For its share, SIA booked a S$945.2 million loss from Air India for FY2026 ended Mar 31. The Singapore group’s financial statements published on Thursday showed that the Indian carrier posted a loss of about S$3.8 billion for the year.
This caused SIA to book a share of losses from associated companies, versus a profit a year earlier.
As at Mar 31, SIA’s carrying amount in Air India amounted to S$1.1 billion against a total cost of S$2.1 billion. The Singapore group’s management assessed that there were indicators of impairment for the investment in Air India, triggered by “challenging operating conditions and heightened geopolitical uncertainty”.
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However, Goh waxed lyrical at the briefing on the tremendous potential of India’s aviation market and added that Singapore is constrained by a lack of a domestic market.
Asked about the “long game” for the Indian carrier, he cited Vistara’s 10-year journey to become an established airline in India before it was folded into Air India in late 2024.
However, he was unable to comment at this time on the amount of capital injected into the associated company in this financial year, nor when the beleaguered Indian airline is expected to turn around.
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He did not reply directly when queried about whether SIA had expected Air India’s sizeable financial loss for FY2026, except saying that the Indian airline is facing largely external challenges.
“I’ve also shown you some of the actions taken in the transformation efforts (by Air India),” he said. “It is going to be a long game. There is no shortcut.”
The SIA group has seconded two of its people, Basil Kwauk and Jeremy Yew, to Air India as chief operations officer and head of engineering and maintenance respectively to support the latter.
Air India reported a plunge in sales following the deadly crash of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner in June 2025, the closure of Pakistani airspace to Indian carriers, and the Middle East conflict.
It has also suspended several international flights for three months from June because of soaring jet fuel prices, with cuts expected to affect key international routes.
Demand holding up
Meanwhile, flying demand is still “holding up” for the SIA group’s full service airline and budget arm Scoot – despite higher airfares to mitigate the spike in jet fuel prices after the Iran war started.
Unlike some rivals, the airline group has increased capacity – for example by 13 per cent to Europe – since the geopolitical conflict began to capture the spillover traffic from the Middle East airlines.
Nonetheless, SIA chief commercial officer Lee Lik Hsin said the group is “monitoring the situation very carefully, because there’s a lot of macro economic uncertainty around the world”.
He expects to have some degree of yield improvement for the first half of the year, but airfare increases would not be able to fully offset the increase in fuel costs.
SIA will watch the situation so as not to price tickets beyond what customers are willing to pay, he added.
Stable fuel supply, for now
SIA chief operations officer Tan Kai Ping said that fuel supply is stable throughout SIA’s network for now, though the situation is quite volatile.
“Nobody actually has a clear view of fuel supply... So what I can say is the first thing that will happen when fuel supply runs short will be fuel rationing at airports,” he said. “So at our airport, you’ll find today, there is no rationing.”
SIA’s earnings for H2 FY2026 more than halved year on year to S$945.5 million.
The 53.6 per cent decline in net profit was due largely to the absence of a one-off, non-cash accounting gain of S$1.1 billion, which came from the disposal of the Vistara airline and was recognised in the year-ago period.
However, it posted a record revenue of S$10.8 billion for H2 FY2026, up 8 per cent year on year. At the operating level, the group’s profit also hit a high of S$1.6 billion, jumping 72 per cent.
Shares of SIA rose 2.6 per cent or S$0.16 to S$6.43 as at 3.34 pm on Friday.
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