Norwegian Founder & CEO Steps Down

Boeing really sh!t on them with their lemon planes.

Let me translate.. The lenders and ultimately the board have no confidence in him, forcing him into early retirement. It’s easy to borrow money and put the company in a difficult financial situation. It’s much harder to turn a company around and make a reasonable profit.

Being CEO is a tough job. While Norwegian did grow too quickly, this is arguably what shareholders wanted at the time. A fresh perspective could nevertheless be very helpful for the company.

Assuming they survive and get back to profitability, the next potential big blow to D8 will be JetBlue entering the transatlantic market in 2021. And while that will be more worrisome to the legacy carriers (especially for their premium products), Norwegian will suddenly have some serious competition for Coach, too.

A new CEO might be more willing than Mr Kjos to consider a takeover approach from IAG. But let’s not forget that Bjorn Kjos will remain a powerful influence within the company, both through the shareholding of his company HBK Holding, but also through his new role as an adviser.

The next Norwegian CEO will probably be Willie Walsh because we still hear rumours of IAG being interested in Norwegian from time to time. With Kjos gone this leaves the door open for IAG as he was one of the main reasons why the bids were rebuffed.

The only interest that IAG has in Norwegian is to control them in order to keep them from bringing fares down on most routes, possibly also destroy them by destroying their model, in order to keep their own high cost LCC-style model flying high.

At the same time that Kjos resigned, Norwegian also published their quarterly results, which should also be included in this story, since it mentions the problems that Norwegian has been facing:

"Revenue per seat kilometer (RASK) increased by 13 percent, and revenue per passenger kilometer (yield) increased by 11 percent. Revenue in this quarter increased by 19 percent to NOK 12 billion, mainly driven by the company's long-distance routes. Nearly 10 million passengers traveled with Norwegian in this quarter, as many as in the same period last year. The occupancy rate was 88 percent, an increase of 1.2 percentage points."

@ABC

The man is 72 years old and tired of the job, mandatory retirement age in Norway is 75 if memory serves me right.

@The Jetset Boyz

From what I hear from some of my contacts in Norway, Kjos had agreed to sell the last time around. It was other large investors in the company that held out for more,.