Air Deccan On The Look Out For Strategic Investors

Vyas Sivanand - Bangalore

Deccan Aviation, which operates India's first low-frill airline in the country recently, announced its plan to sell 26 per cent of its shares to strategic investors. Captain G R Gopinath, director of Deccan Aviation said, "We are growing and people around know that we are moving to great times. These are essentially sales people who look out for an opportunity. Several people have approached us and we are considering options. It will take atleast about four to five months to actually identify the investor as there are so many."

The company plans to go ahead with a total of 100 flights a day from the present 40 flights, soon. "We have four ATR's presently, which will be increased to seven and by April, we will cover about 20 routes including areas around Mumbai and Ahmedabad to cover regions like Surat, Kolhapur, Jamnagar, Rajkot and many more."

By May-June this year, the company will add three more aircraft finally increasing the ATR number to 12. "May-June will see us spreading to Delhi covering Dehradun, Agra, Ludhiana, Chandigarh. By July 1, we will launch three Airbus A320 for trunk routes like Bangalore-Delhi, Mumbai-Delhi, Chennai-Delhi, Mumbai-Kochi, etc. We are also planning to acquire a total of eight Airbuses out of which three are less than five year old while the balance five are brand new," added Gopinath.

The catalogue price for one A-320 plane is US$65 million. Further to such big plans, the thought of considering investors for funds cannot be negated. It was also reported that Golden Ventures Ltd, a NRI venture and The International Finance Corp, the private investment arm of the World Bank, were among those who were having talks with the company.