Dearest Khazanah

Dear Khazanah,
Please consider our appeal below, we cannot stay silent any longer.

"The Khazanah Document on Saving The National Icon has a flaw which will have serious consequences to 6000 MAS staff. The authors of the document carried out a benchmark exercise to compare, among other things, the productivity of MAS staff compared with the industry average and selected airlines namely SIA and Cathay, The benchmark indices are Revenue per Staff (Exhibit 7) and Employee per Aircraft (Exhibit 8). For the purpose of this discussion we will examine the prodctivity of MAS staff against that of SIA simply because the SIA annual report contains a lot of useful data.

Referring to Exhibit 7 of the report the Revenue per Staff is RM850,000 compared to SIA's RM2,250,000 (after conversion).

In Exhibit 8, the Employee per Aircraft for MAS is 183 compared to SIA's 138 per aircraft. The industry average is 123 staff per aircraft.

The question is how were these figures arrived at? There is a feeling that the comparisons were not apple to apple. A test was made using data from the MAS 2013 Annual Report and the SIA 2013/2014 Annual report. This is not to challenge the Khazanah's figures but determine the veracity of the computation method.

The data required for the computation are as follows:

MAS ( Annual Report 2013)

Revenue RM15,121,204,000
Staff strength 19577
Fleet Size (excluding FireFly & MASWings) 108

SIA (2013/2014 Annual Report

Revenue $12479.7 million 
Staff strength 14,240
Number of Aircraft 104

Computation

1, MAS - Revenue per Staff = RM772396
Reported in Annual Report - RM772000
Employee per Aircraft = 181 employee per aircraft

2. SIA Revenue per Staff = $876383
Reported in Annual Report - $876383
Employee per Aircraft = 137 employees per aircraft

It is to be noted that the SIA staff number of 14, 240 does not include the Engineering and Ground Handling staff which are parked under the subsidiary/sister companies thereby giving a favourable outcome to the Employee per Aircraft Index.

The MAS staff number includes personnel in Engineering and Airport Operations resulting in a poor (25% worse) Employee per Aircraft Index compared to SIA.

This confirm the suspicion that the comparisons were not apple to apple.
It is regretable that based on this flawed assumption the authors of the Khazanah report recommended tha 6000 MAS staff be axed. See Exhibit 8 of the report.

What would the MAS figures be if the staff from Engineering and Airport Operations numbering, say, 5000 is not included in the computation?

No of staff involved = 14577
Revenue per Employee = RM1,037,333
Employee per Aircraft = 135 employee per aircraft.

Based on these new figures would the recommendation to axe 6000 still hold?

It would be highly regretable if 6000 staff have to be axed because of a flawed assumption. 

I am appealing to Dr. Don to bring this to the attention of the powers that be to correct the mistake which will cost 6000 people their jobs."     

Former Head of MAS Engineering.