Ryanair Short Analysis

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The growth and success of Ryanair can be explained by its ability to achieve sustainable competitive advantage over its rivals. Looking forwards how easy or difficult will it be to maintain this advantage? Ryanair with more than 58.5 million passengers served and a 25% market share of budget flights in 2009 is a bright leader between low fare airlines (Johnson et al.). This Irish company managed to gain competitive advantage against their rivals using concentrated strategy and rational adjustments to the market changes while constantly developing new ideas and innovations. Ryanair follows strict low prices and no-frill flights policy, where cheap fare is considered as the most important factor. However, there are plenty of doubts whether they will be able to keep their advantage whilst using this strategy in the future. Without any doubt Ryanair value source, as the company itself states in their website, is ability to introduce lowest European fares (Ryanair). By cutting costs and applying completely new charges, like a charge for check-in luggage or checking in at the airport, Ryanair managed to offer prices that were simply inaccessible to the competitors. Ancillary revenues, which accounted for 20.3% of company’s total operating revenue in 2009, led to increase sales, while reducing unit costs (Johnson et al.). Even though all these imposed fees usually work in Ryanair’s favor, there are examples where series of charges make company’s flights more expensive than the closest rivals (Sunday Times). In order to keep the biggest market share some of the fees have to be withdrawn as the price burden might become just too big. Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary is that rare value, with huge enterprise and business knowledge, which made company so successful. Under O'Leary's management, Ryanair thoroughly developed the low-cost model originated by Southwest Airlines (CNN).

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