Qatar Airways is in talks with Bain Capital-owned Virgin Australia to acquire 20% of their shares as the carrier giants fight for market shares in the industry against the dominant player of the industry, Qantas.
As reported in the AFR earlier this month, Qatar Airways’ new CEO, Badr Mohammed Al Meer, told media at the IATA conference in Dubai that talks appeared to be going well. “We continue our communication with the Australian government and we see it moving in a positive way,” he said.
The Transport Minister in November hit back against accusations she was protecting Qantas by knocking back Qatar’s request, saying she “did not take the commercial interests of either Qantas or Virgin into consideration” when making the decision.
“That national interest, as I’ve said very publicly before, includes how is aviation overall recovering after Covid? What are the important elements of aviation [that] we as a nation need to make sure we have in times of emergency? We’ve had to use that recently with evacuating people out of Israel and out of Gaza,” she said.
“What do we need as a nation to be able to hold on to? What is happening in terms of competition overall? They are some of the things I took into consideration when we were asked for basically unprecedented amounts of access by Qatar Airways into our aviation market.”