Kenya Airways (KQ, Nairobi Jomo Kenyatta) Chief Executive Officer Mbuvi Ngunze has revealed that the struggling East African carrier has hired Seabury Consulting, a boutique advisory firm specializing in airline strategy development and turnarounds, to help revamp its operations.
Speaking at a press conference in Nairobi last week, Ngunze said that since the beginning of the year, Seabury specialists had been analysing Kenya Airways' sales, ticketing, and network planning functions with a view to bringing them into line with global best practices.
“The Seabury team will [be] looking at all our commercial business and benchmarking with the industry,” Ngunze was quoted by Kenya's Star newspaper. “They will then give recommendations based on that audit. They will highlight the areas where there is scope for improvement.”
An undisclosed group of global financial firms have also been enlisted to restructure the airline’s debt and retire short-term loans said to amount to KES40.7 billion (USD419.29 million).
Kenya Airways was last month granted a KES4.2 billion (USD43 million) loan from the Kenyan government in addition to an undisclosed amount from fellow shareholder, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines (KL, Amsterdam Schiphol), to help it weather its current storm. Over the past 18 months, the airline has been hit hard by the Ebola outbreak in West Africa as well as a spate of Al Shabaab terrorist attacks which have targeted local cities and towns.
In addition, strong competition from regional rivals Ethiopian Airlines (ET, Addis Ababa International) as well as Emirates (EK, Dubai International) and Etihad Airways (EY, Abu Dhabi International) has forced the carrier to scale back its widebody operations with its B777-200(ER) and B777-300(ER) fleets to be phased out by year-end. It has also transferred its remaining B787-8s on order from Boeing (BOE, Washington National) to sale/lease-back agreements.
