Willie Wlsh shared: India like all countries in the region is impacted by the high oil price. And there’s no part of the world escaping the significant increase in the oil price that we’ve seen. As I mentioned earlier we expect at a global industry level that fuel will represent about 31.4pc of costs this year, $350 billion, a hundred billion increase on where we were last year and that will have and is having an impact for every airline.
So there are some airlines that have hedged in the short term. There’s none that I’m aware of that are 100pc hedged against the increase in the jet fuel price, for those who have hedged, it’s providing them with some time to adjust. But it is impacting on everybody and as a result of that we believe that we will see a slowdown in the growth for the industry.
Now the figure we’ve produced today 2.1pc also reflects the situation in the Middle East. If you extract the impact of the Middle East, we’re looking at growth of about 3.5pc. Which in the current environment I think is still quite healthy. We’re looking at global GDP of 2.5pc, 3.5pc growth if you factor out the impact on the Middle East for the rest of the world remains a pretty positive environment but it is being affected obviously by the high oil prices which will inevitably mean higher ticket prices. There’s just no way to avoid that. It’s not about any individual country, it’s impacting on everybody.
The good news is that I think speculation around fuel shortages, jet fuel shortages — I think that situation has been addressed. We’ve seen refineries around the world increase the production of jet fuel to compensate for the loss production in the Middle East, which obviously was a big supplier into both Europe and Asia, I don’t believe there’s any airlines facing concerns about shortage of supply. I know there was a lot of headlines around that a few weeks ago, but we don’t see that being a particular issue during the rest of this year based on the projected production of jet fuel.
