Jim Armitage: Why I'm out of Africa's Fastjet
As EasyJet puts out yet another cattle-truck set of monthly passenger numbers — its planes were 92% full in November — a less happy picture appears at its African copycat, Fastjet.
I’ve always admired adventurous airline tycoons daring to take on the unloved African markets.
Sir Michael Bishop tells marvellous tales of his early career at British Midland flying planes into bullet-scarred runways in places like Khartoum, mostly out of a sense of fun and duty. Bravo to that.
Fastjet is the new guise of the aviation arm of another great African adventurer, Lonrho.
The shares have fallen from a peak of 150p to just 58p this year. In November it reported October load factors of just 63%, blaming the Tanzanian presidential elections.
It also said it would cease reporting monthly passenger data citing “commercial reasons”.
This morning, three non-execs announced they were stepping down. One of them, Bryan Collings, is doing so because his investment fund Hexam has sold its shares.
The company’s spokeswoman said this was all “just normal”, and that it is expanding healthily.
My heart hopes she’s right. My head says I wouldn’t buy the shares.
