African airlines carry just 18% of all inbound and outbound air traffic on the continent. Tristan Wiggill asked Abel Alemu, regional manager for Southern Africa at Ethiopian Airlines, what African carriers can do to change this.

“African airlines are faced with challenges and competition as any other airlines in the world. To stay competitive in the aviation industry, one needs to have a proper forward-looking strategy and roadmap (a la Ethiopian Airlines’ Vision 2025).

“They [the airlines] need to manage their planning in terms of fleet size, in terms of their costs because the fleet size determines the cost of operations, which is really determined in terms of the business,” he says. “Other than that, they need to have a customer-focused approach and need to build a strong customer base. If you build a strong customer base with a unique and distinct service, competition becomes the least of your worries. You need to focus on these two aspects to survive the competition.”

Current congestion at the Addis Ababa International Airport doesn’t faze him. “It’s a very good problem to have. The congestion is because of our growth; because we have been growing at a higher rate than expected. A lot of passengers are transiting via Addis; most of our traffic is Sixth Freedom traffic (which gives airlines the right to fly from a foreign country to another while stopping in their own country for non-technical reasons).

“At a certain time of the day, when the flights are coming in and out, the airport definitely becomes congested. In order to mitigate that, the Ethiopian government has helped us with the implementation plan for a big airport, which is currently under way. There is an expansion project going on, which is expected to be completed in the next two years. That is how we are trying to solve that problem for our clients transiting via Addis Ababa.”

The airline is aiming to fly to 28 more cities by 2025, which would bring to 120 the number of cities it would serve. ‘We have a mixed view of destinations. We’re looking at continents, with Africa being our priority. We want to keep expanding into different parts of Africa. North Africa has not been our strong point; it’s not a stronghold of ours. Currently, we only operate to Cairo (the destination of the airline’s first ever international flight in 1946) so we would like to put more North African cities on our map. Other than that, it’s about connecting Africa. There is huge traffic between Africa and the Eastern part of the world, mainly to China. We will fly to more destinations in China and will also fly to more Southern African regions, then Latin America and then more cities in South America.”

The airline currently flies directly to Ethiopia from Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban. “These three cities are the main international origins where passengers are departing and coming in – for some time now. We’ll focus on these, but we’ll keep looking to see if other cities in South Africa have the potential to deploy enough direct flight capacity to Ethiopia and then we can do that,” he says.