Tata, Adani, Emirates vie for SriLankan Airlines - report

The Sri Lankan government is in talks with many private companies and airlines as it prepares to privatise SriLankan Airlines, including Emirates and the Indian conglomerates Tata Sons and Adani Group, according to Veeraperumal Ravindran, the carrier’s regional manager for India, Bangladesh, and Nepal. Ravindran was speaking to the Indian broadsheet The New Indian Express to raise the airline’s profile in the Indian state of Kerala, where it is planning to increase its frequencies between Colombo and Thiruvananthapuram in the coming winter schedules from 6x to 7x weekly and to maintain its 10x weekly frequencies to Kochi International. It also plans to start flights to Kozhikode given the availability of aircraft. There has been a steep rise in traffic from India to Sri Lanka in the last seven months, he said, adding that business at the airline is picking up as “things are becoming more normal in Sri Lanka”. However, he said nothing more about the privatisation. As ch-aviation has previously reported, Tata Sons, the owner of Air India, Air India Express, Vistara, and AirAsia India, has long been considered a possible investor in Sri Lanka’s state-owned carrier.<br/>