COMPANY COMMENT: Stephen Saad’s woes mount but some may be baseless
For a long time, it seemed Aspen’s founder and CEO could do no wrong; now it feels like he’s not doing much right
It’s been a tough year for Aspen founder and CEO Stephen Saad. For a long time, it seemed he could do no wrong; now it feels like he’s not doing much right — anywhere in the world. That may be inevitable for a high-profile executive of a high-profile listed company and it may have as much to do with the fickleness of the media as with the fickleness of fate. It could be worse. Consider the unmitigated mess Dudu Myeni has got herself into at South African Airways (SAA). It was going to be difficult for even the smartest of operators to rescue SAA from the self-destruct course it seems to have been on for much of the past 25 years. Has it ever been profitable? Even when it was buried in the bowels of the old South African Transport Services, it probably didn’t make a profit given that it was a monopoly and, as a rule of thumb, about 30% of the passengers were nonpaying. Talk of monopoly brings us back to Aspen and the recent rather strange Competition Commission news conference, that ...
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