저가 항공사의 기업 내·외부요인 분석을 통한 파산 원인 도출에 관한 탐색적 연구

Abstract

Aviation industry is difficult to achieve stable performance compared to other industries because of the high proportion of fixed costs and radical demand changes for external environment. In addition, as the nation’s economic activities are carried out through the aviation industry, it cannot be free from the influence of the government, and plays a role as a social public good to some extent. The ‘Treaty on Open Skies’ has led many airlines companies to enter the industry, and increased competition brought in bankrupt airlines, but a study on airline bankruptcy has been relatively limited. Especially, when difficulties continue in the aviation industry since Covid 19, research on the causes of bankruptcy in the aviation industry is needed. Based on the corporate bankruptcy research framework of previous studies, this study purpose on systematically analyzing the causes of low-cost airlines bankruptcy after ‘Treaty on Open Skies’ Using bankrupt 73 airlines since deregulation as a study sample, we focused on the 37 airlines that can obtain bankruptcy-related data. Specially, we introduced 8 case studies including Canjet, Thomas Cook Airlines, USA3000, Compass Airline, Baboo, Air Berlin, VLM, and Debonair. As a result of case analysis, the reasons for the bankruptcy of 37 low-cost airlines were managerial factors (18%), financial factors (15%), political/international factors (13%), corporate structure factors (6%), and market industry factors (6%), other factors (5%), economic fund factors (2%), and sales factors (1%) were found in the following order. In order to analyze more systematically, we suggested a research framework using two criteria of corporate internal capability and external environmental factors. The study found that the causes of bankruptcy for LCC(Low-cost carrier) were 1) lack of market understanding, 2) uncertain external environment, 3) internal and external difficulties in general, and 4) lack of own capabilities. We also found that the largest number of companies’ bankruptcy was due to a lack of capabilities and uncertain external conditions. We hope these findings provide theoretical, practical implications and future research scalability in the aviation industry.