interesting article on Sheik Ahmed al Maktoum
July 6, 2007
A Flight Plan for the Long Haul
By LESLIE WAYNE
PARIS —The chairman of Emirates airline —Sheik Ahmed bin Saeed al-Maktoum of the ruling family of Dubai — has grand ambitions and a bankroll to match.
He has a huge pot of money to spend: $82 billion from his government, the airline and other financiers. He loves large planes, and he has ordered 55 superjumbo A380s, to create the biggest fleet of these double-decker planes in the world. And he wants to make Dubai, a sheikdom by the sea, the busiest airline hub in the world, overtaking London, New York and Singapore.
It would be easy to dismiss such spending as a rich man’s folly, but Sheik Ahmed, so far, has delivered on his word.
He built Emirates from a two-plane operation, starting with $10 million in 1985, into the world’s eighth-largest international carrier, with 105 planes, all wide-bodies. Emirates is the world’s fastest-growing airline — it will take delivery of one new Boeing or Airbus plane a month for the next five years — and is one of the few to be consistently profitable, with ambitions to become larger still.
“We’ve never seen anything like it before,” said Robert Cullemore, a consultant at Aviation Economics, an advisory firm in London. “We’ve never seen growth at this rate.”
Of course, success for Sheik Ahmed is not just a matter of buying airplanes. He must compete with well-established carriers plying many of the same routes as Emirates, attract enough passengers to fill his vast fleet profitably and hope that the economies of the Middle East, including Dubai, and the emerging markets in Asia and the Indian subcontinent continue to grow at their fast pace.
But at the recent Paris air show, Sheik Ahmed seemed unfazed by those concerns. He met with the Airbus chief executive, Louis Gallois, and added eight more A380s, with a list price of $2.6 billion, to his fleet. He held a news conference to publicize Dubai’s plan to spend $82 billion on aviation, including building a new $33 billion Dubai World Central International Airport that will have six runways and, at twice the size of Hong Kong island, will become the world’s largest airport complex.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/07/06/business/06emirates.600.jpg
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/06/business/06emirates.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
The hard copy had a really nice photo of him smiling.
July 6, 2007
A Flight Plan for the Long Haul
By LESLIE WAYNE
PARIS —The chairman of Emirates airline —Sheik Ahmed bin Saeed al-Maktoum of the ruling family of Dubai — has grand ambitions and a bankroll to match.
He has a huge pot of money to spend: $82 billion from his government, the airline and other financiers. He loves large planes, and he has ordered 55 superjumbo A380s, to create the biggest fleet of these double-decker planes in the world. And he wants to make Dubai, a sheikdom by the sea, the busiest airline hub in the world, overtaking London, New York and Singapore.
It would be easy to dismiss such spending as a rich man’s folly, but Sheik Ahmed, so far, has delivered on his word.
He built Emirates from a two-plane operation, starting with $10 million in 1985, into the world’s eighth-largest international carrier, with 105 planes, all wide-bodies. Emirates is the world’s fastest-growing airline — it will take delivery of one new Boeing or Airbus plane a month for the next five years — and is one of the few to be consistently profitable, with ambitions to become larger still.
“We’ve never seen anything like it before,” said Robert Cullemore, a consultant at Aviation Economics, an advisory firm in London. “We’ve never seen growth at this rate.”
Of course, success for Sheik Ahmed is not just a matter of buying airplanes. He must compete with well-established carriers plying many of the same routes as Emirates, attract enough passengers to fill his vast fleet profitably and hope that the economies of the Middle East, including Dubai, and the emerging markets in Asia and the Indian subcontinent continue to grow at their fast pace.
But at the recent Paris air show, Sheik Ahmed seemed unfazed by those concerns. He met with the Airbus chief executive, Louis Gallois, and added eight more A380s, with a list price of $2.6 billion, to his fleet. He held a news conference to publicize Dubai’s plan to spend $82 billion on aviation, including building a new $33 billion Dubai World Central International Airport that will have six runways and, at twice the size of Hong Kong island, will become the world’s largest airport complex.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/07/06/business/06emirates.600.jpg
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/06/business/06emirates.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
The hard copy had a really nice photo of him smiling.
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