Drivers of Growth in the Airline Industry in Sub-Saharan Africa
Date
2012-09-10
Authors
Meyer, Nicolas Demis
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Abstract
The African airline industry has historically always been very small in
comparison with the global airline industry. Currently Africa constitutes only 3%
of world traffic placing it as the smallest aviation marketing the world, even more
interestingly this figure is predicted to decrease to 2% in 2023 (Fatokun, 2005).
In order to better understand the general trend of decline seen, the factors
which affect growth of the airline industry in Sub-Saharan Africa where studied
and mapped in order to ascertain which of these play a significant role.
Various South African airlines where approached as well as industry experts for
interviews but the response was very poor, with only one industry experts
forthcoming. It was thus decided to mainly utilise a quantitative approach with
comments from the industry expert also considered. A Fuzzy Cognitive Map
(FCM) was constructed based on these findings and was trained using the
gradient descent method Data from South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria where
used as training data as it was thought that these represented a good crosssection
of Sub-Saharan Africa countries.
It was discovered that the size of the economy of Sub-Saharan African
countries contributed the most to the overall growth and profitability of the airline
industry in that country, with the level of alliances, fuel price, legislation as well
as tourism also playing significant roles.
It should be concluded that Sub-Saharan African countries can take steps to
encourage growth in the airline industry within this region, however the biggest
contributing factor will always remain the size and strength of the economy and
thus Sub-Saharan African countries should always place economic growth and
development on the foreground of any commercial aviation development plans
within the country.
Description
MBA thesis
Keywords
Airline industry, Aviation industry