JOIN USDH Radio | The Lead: How aviation industry is weathering the Covid-19 storm
In today's episode of The Lead from DH Radio, we discuss how the aviation industry has been affected by the Covid-19 storm and how the industry is coping with low demand and lockdown with Murali Ramachandran, CEO(India) of Celebi Aviation.
Sagar Kulkarni: Mr Ramachandran, the aviation sector is the worst affected sector due to Covid-19 and you are running a ground-handling and cargo handling firm, how are you weathering the storm?
Murali Ramachandran: Well, it's been pretty challenging. It started in the last four months in particular. I think this is probably is a once in a lifetime event for everyone and I think no one really has a plan or a procedure to deal with such a pandemic.
Apart from the economic fallout of this pandemic, the health risks associated with it, such a pandemic is a new challenge by itself and I think as a generation, we probably hope not to see it again and hope nobody else come across such a pandemic ever. But I think it has skipped a couple of generations and we are witnessing it now. To be honest, how are we dealing with it, it took us by surprise.
People did not take it seriously and assumed that things will start improving as most were optimists that in a month or a month and a half, things will try improving and then it kind of started growing more and more serious and started blowing up on everyone's space. In my view, it is something that we are kind of evolving to manage and recalibrate. But some of the eventualities are beyond our control and I think everybody is impacted in this whole chain.
In the ecosystem, there is not a single individual who is not impacted. Aviation and hospitality being at the forefront, it's going to be challenging time going ahead. Somethings have improved and some haven't at all so there is a bit of status quo now.
It looks like this year is totally wiped out and next year, in my view, is going to be more challenging because right now it is about getting back on your feet after being hit, now it's a matter of continuing the fight and the next year 2021 is going to be challenging because we have a fairly devastating cocktail of fear of this virus and till that doesn't go, there is a poor economy and there is a certain amount of uncertainty and we don't know how this will go. So we as a business entity is creating different scenarios and situations.
And hoping that there could be a worst-case, a best-case and as of now as we are going in the ground-handling business we are heading towards the worst than the worst case that we had predicted. We had thought that things will start improving by July and it's August and it doesn't like anything is going to improve before October. So this is pretty concerning from our perspective.
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