onnecting Dubai with the world and the world with Dubai: This has been the mission of the state-owned airline Emirates for more than 30 years. During this period, the company has only moved in one direction: steeply upwards. Today Emirates is one of the leading airlines in the world – thanks to their legendary service on board and a young fleet of state-of-the-art long-haul aircraft from Boeing and Airbus. Emirates has, in the meantime, left most of its competitors behind, and in the past few years they have mainly achieved profit margins that were well above the market average. It's no wonder that many airlines now look at Dubai's high-flyer with a mixture of admiration and concern. The Emirates success story began more than 30 years ago. On 25 October 1985 the airline started ope-rations with initial capital of USD 10 million and two leased aircraft, an Airbus A300 and a Boeing 737. The airline's first destinations were Mumbai, New Delhi and Karachi. Since then, the airline has gradually de-veloped into the world's largest long-distance airline: The first three destinations in India and Pakistan were followed by London-Gatwick as the first European air-port in 1987, and Bangkok, Manila and Singapore were added in 1990. Ten years after Emirates' founding, there were already 37 destinations in 30 countries, and one decade later 85 destinations in 54 countries. Today, Emirates has approximately 257 wide-body aircraft in operation, including the world's largest fleets of A380 (96) and Boeing 777 (148) aircraft. They fly to 155 destinations in 83 countries on six conti-nents, and transported nearly 52 million passengers in the financial year 2015/16. The Emirates Group has more than 108,100 emplo-yees worldwide, representing over 170 different na-tionalities. Among them, there are more than 4,000 pilots as well as over 24,600 flight attendants from over 140 countries, speaking more than 60 languages. In addition to the airline Emirates, other companies are part of the Emirates Group's international portfo-

lio as well, including dnata (one of the world's largest aviation service company), Emirates Destination & Leisure Management, the frequent traveller program Skywards and Emirates SkyCargo, the world's largest international air cargo operator. In addition to their passenger route network, Cargodivision flies to 15 cargo destinations: Atlanta, Basel, Campinas Viraco-pos, Ciudad del Este, Columbus, Djibouti, Eldoret, Erbil, Liège, Lilongwe, Mexico City, Ouagadougou, Phnom Penh, Quito and Zaragoza. The cargo fleet consists of 13 Boeing 777 cargo aircraft and two Boeing 747-400ERFs.Via Dubai, the airline offers European passengers ide-al connections to the Middle East, Africa, Asia, India, Australia and New Zealand. With the Dubai – Milan – New York route, Emirates operates a direct link bet-ween Continental Europe and the USA, and since March 2017 a daily connection from Dubai via Athens to New York's Newark Liberty International Airport has been included in their network of destinations. From Germany, Emirates flies ten times daily nonstop to its home airport: three times from Frankfurt and Munich as well as twice from Düsseldorf and Hamburg. For two of the three daily Frankfurt connections, as well as for all daily flights from Munich and Düsseldorf, the airline usually uses Airbus A380 aircraft.Thanks to a partnership with Qantas that has been in place since 2013, passengers can enjoy access to a common international network of destinations, the world's largest A380 fleet, exclusive lounges and numerous benefits for frequent travellers. Due to this partnership, travellers benefit from coordinated long-haul flights to and from Australia. Together, both airlines operate 98 weekly flights between Australia and the international hub in Dubai. A tight codeshare agreement connects more than 60 of Emirates' des-tinations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa with more than 50 of Quantas' inner-Australian destinati-ons,totalling almost 5,000 flights per week.For many years Emirates has enjoyed an excellent reputation among travellers. At the Skytrax World Air-line Awards in 2016, 20 million passengers voted the company the best airline in the world for the fourth time in 15 years. Emirates was also delighted to recei-ve another award as well: The airline received an award for the best entertainment above the clouds. This is no surprise, as with its on-board entertainment offers, Emirates is a pioneer and currently offers its passen-gers more than 2,500 film, tv and music channels. And if you prefer to work during your flight, you have access to WLAN and you can use your mobile phone.

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by Christian Buck and François Baumgartner

HIGH-FLYER IN THE DESERT SKY Emirates sets the standards in aviation – and will continue to remain at the forefront

For three decades, Emirates has only moved in one direction: steeply upwards. Thanks to favourable location conditions and consistent growth, the company from Dubai has become a successful global player.

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Mr Govinda Das, as treasurer of one of the biggest and most successful airlines in the world, you play a very important role in the Emirates growth story. What are the key factors of success regarding your role?

Growth is a multi-dimensional concept for Emirates. In our business strategy, we always address a wide range of areas that are critical to creating sustainable growth, whereby diversification is a key part of our vi-sion to create financial highlights in aircraft financing. Emirates is one of the world’s largest international airlines. However, our aim is not to be the biggest, but the best in all that we do. Thus, we are trying to achie-ve an appropriate balance between risk and return. Identification, evaluation and hedging financial risks is done in close cooperation with the operating units to secure transparency and to achieve the the com-pany’s strategic and financial objectives.

What makes an intercultural and successful business relationship?

Emirates stands for value propositions transformed into brand promises. Our brand is an emotional trig-ger for trust and confidence. Successful business relationships are driven by constantly challenging ourselves to achieve new goals and learning new skills. Emirates fully understands the power of trustworthy people with different backgrounds and cultures.

What values are important to you if you look at business relationships?

Trust, fairness and respect are key drivers for our work. All our relationships are motivated by these elements. Thus, we count on transparency, ser-vice and process excellence, as well as on surpas-sing financial standards to achieve sustainable growth for our financial community. It is about long-term relationships which are based on reciprocity

– standing together in good and in bad times.

Everything counts. How do you inspire your financial community?

We inspire our financial community through strate-gic and operative excellence as well as through our competitive advantages. We are close to the market, we contribute know-how, agility and entrepreneurial thinking. Furthermore, our stakeholders are influen-cers and it is about creating unique identities and positions for products and services, hence distingu-ishing our offerings from those of our competitors.

What is your impression of EMP, being a new and rapidly growing player in the aviation finance market?

For me, EMP stands for reliability, for accelerating growth and for a unique management of the investor relationship. They find the right balance of interests between their airline clients and the requirements of their investors. EMP´s creativity is driven by a team that recognises talent and stands for agility and entrepreneurial thinking. They create innovation and opportunities, such as the first hybrid operating lease structure by combining German lenders with institu-tional Islamic capital and a German family office for an A380 aircraft.

EMP STANDS FOR RELIABILITY AND GROWTHby François Baumgartner

As a pioneer, the company has repeatedly set stan-dards in customer service: It was the first airline to offer individual screens in all classes in its entire fleet (1992), the first airline with a private suite concept in commercial aviation (2003) and the first airline where mobile phones could be used on board (2008). Conse-quently, Emirates received the Skytrax Award for Best Entertainment 2016 for the twelfth time in a row. In to-tal, the company has received more than 500 interna-tional awards for its on-board products and customer service.

Apart from satisfied passengers, further factors have been pivotal to the airline's advancement: competi-tive location factors in its home country, low airport fees at the Dubai hub and the fast implementation of necessary infrastructure measures for the expansion of the airport in Dubai. In addition, the airline also be-nefits from low fuel costs in the Gulf region, which is rich in mineral oil, even though the fuel cost ratio is at the same level compared with its competitors. Other

advantages are the company's optimised processes as well as its highly motivated employees. In fact, the major bank UBS attests the high productivity of the airline, which means that its competitors are about 40 % more expensive. The lower costs can also be contributed to the fact that Emirates always makes spectacular big purchase deals with Airbus and Bo-eing, with associated high discounts. Currently orders for 219 aircraft with a volume of approx. USD 108 bil-lion are open, 46 A380s (as of August 2017) and 173 Boeing 777s. The regular placement of orders with the two manufacturers also means that the Emirates aircraft fleet is one of the youngest in the world, with an average age of around six years. "For EMP, Emira-tes is the most important airline partner," Philipp Prior, Managing Director and founding partner of EMP, sta-tes. "Emirates is characterised above all by reliability, professionalism and operational and strategic excel-lence." The creditworthiness of the airline and its vo-lume are also impressive. In this way, Emirates cont-inues to create new and inspiring milestones in the aviation industry. In the future, smaller aircraft could also be added to the wide-body fleet: For the first time in more than 20 years it seems possible that Emirates will again add short- and medium-haul aircraft to its fleet. This is one of the three future scenarios the company is present-ly examining. "With their demand for technology, their strong fleet and their philosophy of customer satisfac-tion, Emirates is a global game changer in the aviation and travel industry," says Prior. Until now, the airline has exclusively relied on long-haul aircraft, but in the future the Airbus A320 or Boeing's competition model 737 could also become part of the airline's fleet. The reason behind this idea are new business opportuni-ties in the immediate neighbourhood: More and more countries in the Middle East are opening up their mar-ket, and therefore Emirates wants to put its business model from the late 1980s to the test. And last but not least, this is how the company can respond to the growing pressure from its competitors such as Etihad from Abu Dhabi and Qatar Airways from Bahrain.

"We are taking our time to see how everything evolves," said Emirates President Tim Clark. A proven tradition the company has remained true to: In the past, correc-tions were made concerning the alignment of Emira-tes. These were never a sign of crisis, but instead helped to prevent problems in advance. It is therefore very likely that Emirates will continue to be one of the aviation industry's high-flyers in the future.

Interview with Nirmal Govinda DasTreasurer Emirates

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