QANTAS: Annual General Meeting today Friday, 4 November

Qantas has been in the news for all the wrong reasons lately, everything from poor service and lost bags, through to the alleged racist treatment of a Muslim family on a flight out of Bali over a child’s pram, which Qantas disputes. That was followed by the awarding by consumer magazine Choice of a Shonky Award to Qantas for its on-time, performance and the difficulties customers experienced in trying to use their flight credits, amongst other performance issues, like lost luggage, and abandoned passengers due to cancelled flights. Qantas of course disputes those claims which you can read here.

More recently, prior to its AGM today, Lucas Baird at the AFR [pay wall protected] penned an article about a potential challenge to the board’s remuneration report due to a proxy firms recommendation against supporting:

‘…the CEO’s involvement in a shorter-term executive retention scheme as the performance targets set may not have been “sufficiently challenging”.’

Australian Financial Review

Naturally Qantas disputes this claim, insisting that the remuneration package for CEO Alan Joyce is appropriate.

ISS, the proxy advisor is an outlier, however. Other advice firms don’t see any issues in the remuneration report.

Improving performance

Qantas has dropped a media release today ahead of the AGM that lists the following improvements in its performance. I have edited the points for brevity. You can read the full release here along with some pretty charts.

• Flight cancellations down to 2.2 %, now below pre-COVID levels.
• Mishandled bags steady at 6 in 1000 passengers
• On time performance: 74 % up from 69 % in September.
• Qantas outperformed our Virgin Australia in 8 months out of the past 12

2PAXfly Takeout

This is another timely reminder to wear your seatbelt when seated. Holding you close to your seat will protect you from the sort of injuries sustained on this flight, when unsecured passengers flew to the ceiling of the aircraft, and then came crashing down once the ‘drop’ ceased.

The hope will be that this is an anomaly – a ‘freak accident’ in casual parlance. If it is a systemic error either mechanical or electronic, then this is a larger concern for the airlines that fly Boeing Dreamliner 787 aircraft. Let’s hope it isn’t. If it is, it will pile on the woes to Boeing’s existing stack.

Qantas has forecast a return to underlying profit in the half year to December 2022, so shareholders should be happy. On the other hand, the airline has been plagued by bad statistics on flight cancellation and delays, particularly for its JetStar arm. Qantas admits this, but has figures to prove that this is turning around.

With the Qantas Board chairman, Richard Goyder and a couple of other directors up for re-election (or ‘elimination!’ if you are a Drag Race fan), this should be an interesting meeting.

Oh yes, and Qantas paid no tax last year.

I’ll try and filter through any results from the meeting as they are reported from the 11 am AEST.