In exclusive interview, the Southeast Asian airline’s longtime CEO Goh Choon Pong outlines his plans to turn India into its next big hub.
By Jonathan Burgos , Forbes Staff
G oh Choon Phong, CEO of Singapore Airlines, has plenty to brag about: record profits, nearly full planes, a coveted Best Airline award. But the subject that really excites Goh, 60, is India. “You can just tell how much potential there is,” Goh enthuses in an exclusive interview in late November at the SIA Training Centre near Changi Airport. For Singapore Airlines, the potential of India is more than a way to fill some seats. Goh plans to make it a hub—in effect, a second home for the airline with almost unlimited room for growth. And SIA inked a historic deal in late 2022 to make that plan a reality, giving it a 25.1% stake in Air India that is expected to close in March this year.
Of course, SIA can’t be separated from Singapore. It is the city-state’s phenomenally successful flag carrier. Its soigné cabin attendants are emblems of Singapore known around the world. But during the pandemic, all the vulnerabilities of being from such a small country, population 5.6 million, came home to roost.
“We were very badly affected by the pandemic because we didn’t have a domestic market,” Goh says. At the nadir, April and May 2020, SIA flew fewer than 11,000 passengers each month compared to 3.4 million in January of that year—3% its pre-pandemic capacity. “It was devastating,” recalls Goh.
That vulnerability has been there from the start, and it’s not because SIA hasn’t tried to build aviation hubs around the region before. In China, it proposed to buy a stake in China Eastern Airlines in 2007 but shareholders of the state-owned airline rejected the deal. A joint venture between SIA’s budget airline Scoot and Nok Air in Thailand collapsed during the pandemic.
Singapore Airlines Bets Big On India
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