All Nippon Airways (ANA) has been hit by a major high-level personnel shake-up, with the airline's top five senior executives and chairman all announcing their resignations, only days after the company's president Seiji Fukatsu was forced to quit.
Almost one-third of ANA's 32-member board of directors are to leave the airline, including its powerful honorary chairman, Tokuji Wakasa, and chairman, Takaya Sugiura. Apart from Fukatsu, the ten board resignations include two senior vice-presidents, Akiro Hasegawa and Aoki Hideo, and two managing directors, Yuzuru Masumoto and Kanji Kimura.
The airline's board also overturned an earlier decision to appoint its real-estate chief executive Kenzo Yoshikawa as Fukatsu's replacement. It will instead now promote senior managing director, Kichisaburo Nomura, to airline president and chief executive.
According to airline insiders, this latest shake-up is a result of the earlier forced resignation of Fukatsu and the decision to replace him with an airline outsider. The move, which was largely engineered by Wakasa and Sugiura, met with a barrage of public criticism, including from within the Japanese Government.
The honorary chairman and chairman, both of them former transport ministry bureaucrats, were forced to resign. This in turn undermined Yoshikawa's appointment as president.
Nomura's elevation appears to be a compromise designed to heal differences as someone who is acceptable to the outgoing chairman and president. "Both Wakasa and Sugiura would not leave without some form of concession," says an airline official.
He is expected to continue with Fakatsu's policy of cutting costs and restructuring the airline. It was Fakatsu's earlier efforts to reduce salaries and hive off non-core businesses that put him on a collision course with the airline's trade unions and, ultimately, Wakasa.
ANA, in the meantime, has announced better-than-expected results for the last financial year ending 31 March. The airline made a net profit of ´3.9 billion ($31.4 million), up 26.6% on 1995 and higher than the previously projected ´3.4 billion.
Operating revenue also exceeded earlier forecasts, rising by 4.9% to ´887.4 billion. Earnings were boosted by a record number of passengers, totalling 39.7 million, and by limiting cost growth.
Source: Flight International
