Research On Selecting Partners When Chinese Private Airlines Build Strategic Alliance

Private airlines in China have gained very good opportunities since China allowed investors from home and abroad to put capital into civil aviation industry. But development of private airlines is in the primary stage. They are very small and short of capital, experience, airplanes, air lines, so they are in a bad situation in civil aviation industry. In addition, with the influence of the global financial crisis, these companies'operation became worse for the decrease of demand. Consequently, they should change the way of their operation and join in airline alliance in order to shape advantage of alliance, then they can lower the cost and expand the scale. The first important problem they face is choosing partner.On the basis of airline alliance theory, partner selecting theory and method, the author introduce three types of partner which private airlines face at present, analyses the present operation of private airlines in China, and point out the objective they may want to achieve : lower the cost, expand scale of production and operation, establish good brand image. Then the author classifies the factors which influence selecting partner into two types: the first is resources and capacity of potential partner, it includes human resource level, marketing capacity, financial management, scale of production and operation, relations with government; the second is relations between members in alliance, including complementarities of market, complementarities of resources and capacity, equality of strength, compatibility of strategic objective, compatibility of organization culture, relations between leaders of partners. Then the system of evaluating indicator for Chinese private airlines to choose strategic partner is established. After establishment of evaluating indicator, and carrying out survey, competitive importance of indicators and quality of the partners are quantized with the method of AHP and YAAHP software. The research calculates and analyses the weight of indicators and scores of partners, gives the conclusion that the best choice is the top three state-owned airlines. According to the conclusion, suggestions are put forward in two levels, the macroscopic level and microcosmic level.