Its a good story. Sometime back you had sent me a smaller story. He now seems
to be a partner with Laximi Mital a steel giant. something nice to know. I have
read a lot on great people who made great fortunes and all that comes in form
of good Idea. Develope this idea and you get what you expect from life. menino
Original message From:"Camillo Fernandes"< [email protected] >Date:
20 Feb 12 12:51:16Subject: How AirAsia's CEO Tony Fernandes speads his wings
source :goanvoice.org.ukTo: How AirAsia's CEO Spreads His Wings Tony Fernandes
says he is living a "boy's own dream." Last summer, the Malaysianborn
entrepreneur was running Asia's biggest budget airline, a Formula 1 team and a
global hotel chain. Clearly, this wasn't demanding enough, because in August
the selfconfessed sports fan paid around £35 million ($55.4 million) for a
majority stake in English Premier League soccer team Queens Park Rangers.
Enlarge ImageFor a shy boy who, at the age of 12, was dispatch
ed on his own from Malaysia to a private school in England, Mr. Fernandes has
come a long way. In 2001, he paid 25 cents for AirAsia Bhd, a Malaysian
governmentowned airline. Starting with two planes and $11 million in debt, the
lowfares airline has since carried some 120 million passengers from its hub in
Kuala Lumpur. "I bought a football club, I own a Formula 1 team. I have been in
the music business and I own an airline," the former Warner Music managing
director says with a laugh. "It's kind of unreal. But you do make your own luck
and fortune favors the brave." On any given day, Mr. Fernandes can be found
fielding a request for a multimillionpound soccer player, watching his F1 team
Caterham at a racing grand prix, or buying a fleet of planes for AirAsia. When
we meet at his town house in central London, Mr. Fernandes is all smiles,
swiftly brushing off the suggestion that he is spreading himself too thinly.
Joined by Philip Beard, the man he appointed as chief executi
ve of QPR, he studies new stadium plans for the club in West London. At the
same time, Mr. Fernandes scans the price of oil on his iPad, fires out messages
to his 168,000 Twitter followers and explains why attending the exclusive Epsom
College as a boy was such a "tremendous" experience. "What did I take away from
it? A challenge—that anything is possible if you put your mind to it. That
nothing comes easy in life [and the importance of] teamwork. "The best part of
school in England was that it exposed you to lots of everything—different
experiences. It brought your personality out." Not that life in 1970s Britain
was idyllic. Irked at not being invited to the house of a friend's friend, he
discovered it was because it was feared he wouldn't be "capable of using a
knife and fork." "He thought we lived in a treehouse," he says. "This was 1977
and no one knew [of] Malaysia," though he stresses such gaucherie was the
exception, not the rule. A decade ago, discontented at th
e direction the music business was taking, the father of two resigned from his
wellpaid executive job, remortgaged his house for $500,000 and took on the
notinconsiderable risk of buying up a failing air carrier. "I went to my boss
[at Warner Music] and quit. He was thrilled, because he always wanted to get
rid of me... because he thought I was after his job. Which I was! And I walked
out not knowing what the hell I was going to do." Mr. Fernandes, a graduate of
the London School of Economics, had been inspired to run his own airline by a
visit to Luton Airport, some 40 miles (65 kilometers) north of London, where,
by the beginning of the past decade, lowcost European air carriers were in the
ascendant. "I saw Stelios [HajiIoannou] on TV talking about [his British
lowcost airline] EasyJet. So I went to Luton and I saw people flying to
Barcelona for £6 and Paris for £9. Everything was orange. I thought: 'This is
great!'" He credits his mother, Ena, with teaching him the art
of selling and introducing him to the romance of flying. A frequent flier,
she would be met on her return by fiveyearold Tony and his father, a doctor.
"My love for planes started there," he says. "Me and my dad would go to the
airport really early. We were early planespotters." Decades later, Mr.
Fernandes and his business partner Kamarudin Meranun founded Tune Air Sdn.
Bhd., inking the deal for AirAsia within weeks of 9/11, an event that led to
the collapse of several major airlines. It was a terrific risk. "There is a
very fine line between brilliance and stupidity," Mr. Fernandes concedes. "'You
idiot, you gave such a great job away to start an airline.' If it failed a lot
of people would have said that, right? But I [had] reached a point and maybe
Epsom taught me that you only live once. And if you don't try, you don't know."
The airline was an immediate hit with passengers and, in 2004, it became a
publicly listed company after a Malaysian initial public offering. Bet
ween 2007 and 2011 it has won travel consultancy Skytrax's best lowcost
airline award four times. Mr. Fernandes has now taken the lowfares model into
accommodation, forming Tune Hotels in 2007. With 14 hotels in Asia and Europe,
it plans to reach 100 hotels worldwide by 2016. In 2010, Mr. Fernandes indulged
his love of sport by branching off into Formula 1, under the name Team Lotus
(now called Caterham for the 2012 season), of which he is team principal.
He is
awaiting "payment" from a wager with Richard Branson, a new F1 team principal
himself, for whom Mr. Fernandes briefly worked in the 1980s as an auditor at
Virgin. The two F1 newcomers had a bet on which team would finish higher. Mr.
Branson lost. The penalty? To work in a female flight attendant's uniform for a
day on the winner's airline. This year, Mr. Fernandes took on a higherstakes
gamble, returning full circle to the U.K. to take a majority stake in QPR, a
club that returned to the English Premier League after
a 15year hiatus. As the chairman of QPR Holdings Ltd., he is the public face
of a consortium that took a 66% share in the club. The remaining third is held
by the family of Londonbased Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal. The former
music executive in Mr. Fernandes comes out when he describes the marketing
potential of the EPL. "English football is massive," he says. "There is only
one way that it's going to go. And that's upward." And he hasn't been afraid to
take tough decisions. In January, he sacked Neil Warnock, the manager who
brought the club back into English football's top flight, but who had failed to
arrest an alarming slide down the EPL table. Mr. Fernandes took to Twitter to
communicate his move, telling shocked fans that it had been a "very, very hard
decision." Since this interview, the QPR chairman has also had to use his
experience to contend with a highprofile race incident. In a game with Chelsea,
Anton Ferdinand, a player Mr. Ferdinand bought last summer
, was allegedly racially abused by John Terry. Mr. Terry, 31, denies the
charge and will appear in court in July. The case itself indirectly brought
about the resignation of the England soccer manager. Fabio Capello stepped down
this month after the Football Association, the game's governing body, stripped
Mr. Terry of the England captaincy. In a statement issued after the original
incident in October, Mr. Fernandes said the club didn't condone racism in any
shape or form, but wouldn't be making any further comment on the matter at that
stage. Clearly, QPR has taken up a huge amount of time and energy. But life in
the Premier League hasn't dulled his enthusiasm for business. Asked about his
recipe for success, he replies: "I honestly believe the first thing in business
is: can you make something that people want? Cheap travel in Asia is a
nobrainer." "How do you build a competitive business? Whether it's Lotus,
whether it's QPR, whether it's Tune Hotels…build a business th
at people want. Have the right people. Be focused and allow people to get on
and do their jobs. Give them a strategy, but allow them to go and do it. "The
very last thing, which I think is the most important, is: people have simply
got to enjoy coming into work."JOIN THE DISCUSSIONBe the first to commentGet
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