Tony Fernandes
Tony Fernandes
Tan Sri Anthony Francis "Tony" Fernandes, CBEis a Malaysian entrepreneur. He is the founder of Tune Air Sdn. Bhd., who introduced the first budget no-frills airline, AirAsia, to Malaysians with the tagline "Now everyone can fly". Fernandes managed to turn AirAsia, a failing government-linked commercial airline, into a highly successful budget airline public-listed company. He has since founded the Tune Group of companies...
NationalityMalaysian
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth30 April 1964
CityKuala Lumpur, Malaysia
CountryMalaysia
We have some teething issues but other than that everything is great.
Airlines are one of the last things to be liberalized.
In Europe, they travel a lot lighter. I always joke that my Indonesian passengers bring their house and their neighbors house.
Watch out, Singapore, is all I have to say.
Aviation is for the common man. My goal is to enable everyone to fly. It shouldn't be only for the rich.
Winning is an amazing feeling. You don't get that in business; you don't get that in many things.
I look for people who have drive, who have ambition, who are humble. I've hired many people at very strange places.
I think airlines have been very much parrots. They'll just follow what everyone else is doing. Why change a model that they're happy in? And it takes someone like myself or Richard Branson who comes from outside the industry to say, 'Hey, let's try something new.'
I've lived in Jakarta and have seen a lot more by living here, and I understand that there's so much more to Indonesia than just Bali and Jakarta.
Don't kid yourself that anyone in the Premier League is going to do you any favours.