Jet Airways said on Tuesday the domestic aviation industry would soon witness a shakeout, but hoped the country's largest private airline would come out of it unscathed though it suffered substantial losses in the first half of the current fiscal.
"Nobody wants to lose on a continuous basis so much money, either some airlines will close down or capacity induction will slow down. We are in a special phase and there will be a shakeout," Jet Airways CEO Wolfgang Prock-Shauer told PTI in Kolkata on Tuesday.
Admitting that stiff competition in the domestic market had led to a decline in the load factor in the first half of the year, he said, everybody was fighting for the whole industry load of 500 million.
Stiff competition from the growing number of private operators as well as its own ambitious international expansion plans coupled with the high fuel price had resulted in a Rs 100 crore (Rs 1 billion) loss for Jet Airways in the first half of 2006-07, against Rs 164 crore (Rs 1.64 billion)