Business Daily meets: Tony Fernandes

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service, the business podcast which brings you the trends, the money and the people who make the world and its money go round. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:14)
In 1969, a plan to show support for an anti-racism protest turned the lives of 14 promising black student athletes upside down. Amazing sports stories from the BBC World Service tells their story.
Search for amazing sports stories wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

**Gideon Long** (0:34)
My guest on Business Daily today has worked in the music industry, has owned a Formula One team, and spent a decade as the co-owner of a London football club, one of the founding members of the English Premier League.

**Tony Fernandes** (0:46)
I'm driven by passion. I love passion, I love passionate people. And football fans are at the top of passion. Probably the greatest day of my life, apart from my kids being born, was when we won the play-off. And suddenly I'm at Wembley Stadium with 45,000 fans singing my name.
You can't make that up.

**Gideon Long** (1:08)
These days he's concentrating on running a successful airline, in his own distinctive and sometimes outspoken way.

**Tony Fernandes** (1:15)
I am impulsive.
I do go with what I feel. I have this philosophy, though, that transparency and honesty is still the best policy, not to hide behind press releases or spokesmen. You know, if you're honest, people are going to respond in the right way.

**Gideon Long** (1:31)
He is Tony Fernandes, the co-founder of AirAsia, the budget airline based in Malaysia that has transformed travel around the ASEAN region in Southeast Asia. I've been speaking to him about his career, football, motor racing, the impact of COVID on the airline industry and the recent safety issues at Boeing. But I started by asking him about his upbringing in Malaysia.
So did you come from an entrepreneurial business family?

**Tony Fernandes** (2:00)
Well, split in two really. My father was quite the opposite.
He was a left-wing doctor who didn't believe in private medicine and my mother was a raving capitalist. So I'm slapped down the middle actually.

**Gideon Long** (2:14)
So you then came to England as a young boy and you went to boarding school. What was that experience like?

**Tony Fernandes** (2:19)
Well, I had never been to England. I was told I was going to boarding school. I was packed off from a small airport, well, our national airport, which was small by international standards.
Those are the days before security, et cetera, so everyone could wave to me from the balcony. Arrived in Heathrow Airport and it was a huge airport even in 1977 And thought, wow, and never seen so many white people before in my life. Then traipsed on a green line bus to Epsom, walked up to Epsom College and thought, what have I done wrong in my life when I saw the inhospitable conditions that I was gonna live in for five years? I remember, you know, I was an avid, avid footballer and thinking, wow, these goal posts are rather large, not realizing there were rugby posts.
So it was a big culture shock for me.

**Gideon Long** (3:08)
You studied at the London School of Economics. You worked as an accountant for a while, and then you worked in the music industry at Warner. And this was a period where the industry was changing a lot with the rise of Napster. Did you ever consider setting up a business in the music industry?

**Tony Fernandes** (3:24)
Yeah, when I left, the whole reason I was leaving Warner Music was, I didn't like the three mergers that went by. It first became Time Warner, then CNN, finally AOL. And that was the final straw for me. I was a big believer in streaming as well.
I thought the record industry should support Napster. You can't hold technology back. That's like saying, we're not gonna support the cars, and we're only gonna support the horse industry.
But my bosses didn't believe in that. And during that time, I kept thinking, yeah, there must be a model of developing artists through online. And I started playing around with that. But then, lo and behold, I had the idea of setting up an airline.

**Gideon Long** (4:01)
And is it fair to say that that idea for setting up the airline came from seeing the model of other budget airlines like Ryanair and EasyJet?

**Tony Fernandes** (4:08)
Yes, I always had a soft spot for planes.
And the first model I saw which intrigued me was Freddie Laker. I thought SkyTrain and Skybus were incredible models. I used to stand by the check-in desk and talk to the check-in staff on how could they make it so cheap? I mean, they were put out of business by the oligopoly of American Airlines and British Airways, et cetera. But Freddie Laker was the first instance. And then my second instance was taking a flight to Dublin on Ryanair.