Singapore Airlines Ltd is facing no problem selling business-class tickets on its ultra-long nonstop flights to the US, but is having to price premium economy seats very attractively, a senior executive said yesterday.
The carrier last month resumed after five years the world’s longest commercial flight, a nearly 19-hour nonstop journey from Singapore to New York.
The airline ordered seven new ultra-long range twin-engine Airbus SE A350-900ULRs fitted with just 67 business class and 94 premium economy seats for those flights and for nonstop services to Los Angeles and San Francisco.
These flights have no economy class seats.
It represents a major expansion in the US market for Singapore Airlines and a test of whether the carrier can charge the 20 percent price premium that travel industry data has shown is typical for ultra-long nonstop services due to their popularity with time-sensitive business travelers.
Singapore Airlines executive vice president Mak Swee Wah (麥瑞華) said there was existing demand for business class, which he expected would continue to pick up.
However, for premium economy, some markets were not “entirely familiar” with the product, which offers more leg room and other amenities than economy class, Mak added.
“I think we need to continue to stimulate and encourage the market to consider this product, initially with very attractive pricing, but eventually I think people will see that even at prices which we offer it is a good product to purchase, because it is a very long flight,” he said at an analyst and media briefing.
His comments came after Singapore Airlines on Tuesday reported an 81 percent plunge in second-quarter net profit, hurt by higher fuel prices, lower airfares and noncash losses at part-owned Virgin Australia Holdings Ltd.
Yields, a proxy for ticket prices, fell 2.2 percent in the second quarter compared with a year earlier, failing to help offset the impact of a 24 percent rise in fuel prices.
Singapore Airlines is offering premium economy fares as low as S$1,698 (US$1,229) from Singapore to New York for weekday travel over part of the peak Christmas travel period, its Web site showed.
That is in line with economy class fares from premium rivals like Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd (國泰航空) and Dubai, United Arab Emirates-based Emirates Airline that require a stop and longer travel time, a search on Expedia.com showed.
Mak declined to comment on whether Singapore Airlines would consider changing the configuration of the airplane to include more business-class seats.
When it previously flew to New York and Los Angeles nonstop on four-engined A340-500 jets that used more fuel, it had initially offered both “executive economy” and business class, but later switched to an all-business class configuration. Those flights were abandoned in 2013, when high fuel prices made them uneconomical.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts