Qatar Airways Buys 5% Stake In China Southern (And Trolls American Airlines In The Process)

They're enormous airlines, not teenage girls... I don't quite see why Qatar and American cooperating with the same airline it's going to remotely irritate American anyway - they already do with other carriers.

If this does somehow annoy American then I'm sure it will make Baker happy, but I highly doubt they make large financial investments just to "troll" others. Not least because they could have done so far better by buying American shares.

Nice to see your inner Real Housewife in action after a long time! I believe QR and CZ will make for good partners in Oneworld (when CZ joins)—no kidding here. But I don't know how CX, AA and QF will respond.

@Callum: Akbar often seems to be not more than a teenage girl.

@ Callum -- We're talking about an airline where the CEO flies to certain destinations and flies certain planes to certain destinations to "rub salt in the wound" of competitors. You're giving them too much credit. 😉

@Lucky QR owns 49% of Air Italy and not 45%.

I find this a very interesting development. Qatar's shares are apparently worth more (more power) than American's - and they made sure to make this known by mentioning 'certain A and H shares'.
What's interests me even more is how the relationship between Cathay and China Southern will develop. There's got to be some interesting drama there....

There is some interesting details behind this. On Dec 28, QR purchased 8600 A share and 6000 H share which is 0.0001% of CZ. Before that QR holds 4.9999% of CZ. So I guess QR prepared for this low key trolling long time ago lol.

Not only is QR not going to leave Oneworld, they are slowly preparing to run the alliance the way they want it to be run. the CZ purchase is a very small piece in the puzzle, but a meaningful one. More interesting, it looks to me like AAB is also preparing to make it impossible for QR to be thrown out of Oneworld. A possibility is that the predatory QR low fares out of the US and/or the Fifth Freedom QR flights are finally on their way in.

Hopefully he can make those China Southern flight attendants look as good as the kind ME3 airlines use. I'm disgusted by the American carrier attendants

Love your Real Housewives references hahaha

The Real Housewives of OneWorld is how we should now refer to these 3 airlines LOL.

I think QR and AA will make up soon and AA will allow them to buy a stake.

Though unlikely to happen , it that would really be entertaining if QR gained a controlling interest in any of the big 3 US airlines . Imagine AAB trolling in overdrive then .

Edit : remove 'that'

@Lucky - I think you're not giving them enough credit... As I said, if they wanted to waste millions and annoy AA then they'd be better off buying the stake in AA that they originally wanted. It's a publicly traded company. They can raise public objections, they can't deny it.

While I'm sure they'd revel at any chance to annoy AA, I doubt this is anything other than a normal business decision. And as I said before, I doubt AA are that annoyed by this.

"Trolling"? I thought that was something one did on the internet? Millennial speak....