Strategic management. Current strategic structure for Qantas airline - Essay Example

The company is an award winner for being in the top 6 airlines in the world for the past 5 consecutive years.The in flight entertainment and wine list have also won it numerous awards.Qantas Chief Executive Officer Alan Joyce has outstanding leadership experience in airlines and,therefore,understands the operation relatively well. Qantas has a strong governance structure and board which includes individuals with a wide range of experiences. The airline also operates a range of businesses that include baggage handling, check in and passenger lounges.

It also operates Qantas catering that runs two businesses: Snap Fresh, a big manufacturer of frozen meats and other, different meal components; Q catering this is premium catering businesses. Q catering operates 7 centers across Australia and also sells to other airlines. It also supplies about four million bottles of the country’s wine. The airline has interests in the Singapore firm Holiday Tours and Travel. The airline merged with Jet set in July 2008, to create Jet set Travel World, where Qantas Airline owns 58 percent.

Qantas program, frequent flyer, is another business with 15 million members. The program supplied over 450000 award seats on the program partner airlines. Qantas engineering runs a large maintenance and repair business that has earned the tag of being the best for their safety records. The airline also operates a holiday travel business. Qantas airline is a well branded airline as the spirit of Australia, and it has a number of outstanding accepted TV advertisements on this theme. Domestically, it is a well supported full service airline and in the Global travel as the Australian airline.

The airline has still managed to be among the world’s most profitable airlines. However, in mid 2009 the profits became predicted to fall by 100 million. In response to this financial crisis Qantas airline has grounded decided to ground 10 aircraft, and has also informed Boeing that it will defer its orders for the 737-14 version of the aircraft and also a delay for the delivery of the new 15, 787 Dream liners. The decisions taken by the outgoing CEO George Dixon, to save money, has affected the airline both negatively and positively.

He improved the bottom line but destroyed the operations of the Qantas engineers and the baggage handlers. British airways and Qantas airline underwent a number of merger talks in the late 2008. The benefits of this merger was the economies of scale present in the buying and flying of the aircraft, joint frequent flyer scheme and also, the joint IT scheme. However, problems in negotiations proved that the merger would not proceed, and the Qantas executives claimed to be looking for mergers with other airlines.

The downsizing of the airline led to a number of strikes by the airline engineers and the baggage handlers. The CEO decision to outsource about 7000 of the airline employees became unwelcome (Hanson, 2010). This number of strikes have cost the airline lost revenue as more than 300 flights had to be cancelled during the period of the standoff between the management unions and the management board. During this period, Qantas airline lost Air New Zealand, which transitioned out of its maintenance contract with the airline, and opted to use the Cathay Pacific maintenance people.

The strikes have proven fact that the Qantas airline workforce got well unionized and aggressive in the defense of their working conditions. Corporate and Business Strategy using the Balanced Score Board I have recommended the intensive strategy that includes; market penetration, market development and market development. Due to the nature of the industry the strategy is best for the company to survive. Market penetration should be implemented when the present market becomes not saturated, the rate of the current customers can be increased, and sales in the industry are increasing.

In market penetration, the number of the sales person gets increased, increasing