State-owned Vietnam Airlines said Saturday that it had earned pretax profits of 18.8 million dollars in the first nine months of 2007, almost as much as the whole of last year. The national flag carrier said it had earned more than 83 percent of its target for the whole of 2007. It did not compare its performance with the same period last year.
But the airline said in a statement that it had faced obstacles. "Despite the air transport market's growth of 17 percent year-on-year in the first nine months of the year, there remained a number of difficulties in the business environment," it said.
These included competition on international and domestic routes and higher fuel prices, it added. The carrier transported more than 5.8 million passengers between January and September, a year-on-year increase of 12.7 percent. Some 3.4 million were Vietnamese and 2.3 million were foreigners, with the latter figure up by only one percent against the same period last year.
It also transported more than 82,400 tonnes of cargo. Vietnam Airlines, one of the most successful state-owned enterprises earmarked to be partly privatised soon, made a full-year pretax profit of 304.5 billion dong (19 million dollars) last year.
On Thursday, Vietnam Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung approved the company's plan to boost its fleet to 107 planes by 2020. He assigned the finance ministry to go ahead with the previously announced partial privatisation.
The premier also agreed to establish a partly private company by reorganising subsidiary Vietnam Air Service Co, which industry sources said would be turned into a low-cost carrier.
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