Taiwan’s first budget airline named ‘V air’

January 26, 2014 Leave a comment

Taiwan’s first budget airline named ‘V air’

AFP
January 24, 2014, 12:06 am TWN

TAIPEI–Taiwan’s TransAsia Airways said Thursday a low-cost carrier it aims to launch later this year will be called “V air” as it seeks to tap the growing budget travel market.

TransAsia said it picked “V air” out of nearly 8,000 entries in a public naming contest while the new carrier’s Chinese name will be “Wei Hang,” which means “mighty airline” in English.

“V can stand for voyage, vision, vivid, or victory which symbolizes the positive energy a new company requires and can help boost the public’s preference and acceptance of the new company,” it said in a statement.

Two winners of the naming contest are entitled to unlimited free flights on the budget airline for 10 years, it said.

The company, Taiwan’s first private airline, said in November last year it would spend around NT$3 billion (US$100 million) to launch Taiwan’s first low-cost airline catering to the needs of Taiwanese travelers.

TransAsia plans initially to lease two to three brand-new Airbus A320/A321 planes and hopes to start flying by year’s end.

TransAsia — which flies to Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Vietnam — has been expanding as it benefits from increased revenues from new China routes that have opened up in recent years as relations between Beijing and Taipei have improved.

Demand for discount flights has been rising in Asia. Twelve foreign budget airlines, including Malaysia-based AirAsia and Japan’s Peach Aviation, offer services to and from Taiwan.

Taiwan’s leading carrier China Airlines announced in December that it would set up a new no-frills airline in a joint venture with Singapore’s budget carrier Tigerair, expected to become operational in 2014 with three A-320s.

 

Filed under Macro Trends

Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

Leave a comment