Emirates Announces Repatriation Flights to Five Indian Cities Between July 12-26, 2020

Emirates will be operating special repatriation flights to five Indian cities between 12 and 26 July to assist stranded Indians get home and for residents of UAE currently in India to return to the UAE.

The flights will be operated to Bengaluru, Delhi, Kochi, Mumbai and Thiruvananthapuram between 12 and 26 July 2020 offering the following flight frequencies

Bengaluru: twice daily flights

Delhi: twice daily flights

Kochi: twice daily flights

Mumbai: thrice daily flights

Thiruvananthapuram: once daily flights

The flights to Bengaluru and Mumbai are subject to state government approval.

Flights can be booked on emirates.com, through travel agents, Emirates’ sales offices and contact centre. Passengers must meet all the entry requirements of the destination to be allowed to board the flights.

Flights from Dubai to India

Only Indian citizens stranded in the UAE will be allowed to fly from Dubai to the five Indian destinations.

Flights from India to Dubai

These flights will be available for UAE nationals and residents with prior entry approval from the General Directorate of Residency and Foreign Affairs (GDFRA) for residents of Dubai and ICA approval for residents of other emirates of the UAE.

All passengers travelling from airports in India to Dubai are also required to carry a negative Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) certificate issued by a laboratory authorised by the government of India to be accepted on the flight. Certificates must be issued no more than 96 hours before departure.

More information for returning UAE residents can be found at https://www.emirates.com/ae/english/help/flying-to-and-from-dubai/

Health and Safety First

Emirates has implemented a comprehensive set of measures at every step of the customer journey to ensure the safety of its customers and employees on the ground and in the air. Emirates has modified its services onboard these flights in line with requirements from the authorities. Visit www.emirates.com/wherewefly for more information on the products and services onboard each flight.

Premium customers travelling from Dubai can now also enjoy Emirates’ Chauffeur Drive service and relax in its Lounge facility at Dubai International airport, with the restart of these signature services after a full health and safety review.

Emirates continues to offer customers a wide range of travel options. The airline’s network will encompass 58 cities by mid-August covering destinations across six continents.

Is Motorola planning more layoffs?

Motorola Inc is expected to make steep cost cuts, including more layoffs, at its mobile devices division as a broad slump in demand for cell phones exacerbates its own market share declines.

With even market leader Nokia warning about weakening phone demand, analysts say Motorola could miss Wall Street's already low expectations for phone sales in the fourth quarter and the current quarter. As a result, they expect Motorola to cut the size of its handset unit -- beyond the 3,000 layoffs the company announced in October, which were mostly in its handset unit and equivalent to 4.5 per cent of its workforce.

"Resizing is necessary beyond the 3,000," said Avian Securities analyst Matthew Thornton, who estimated that Motorola's phone unit could have roughly 28,000 employees after the previously announced layoffs.

Motorola declined to comment. The Schaumburg, Illinois-based company fell to fourth place in the global phone market in the third quarter of 2008, and said key new devices would be ready in the second half of 2009, which could mean deeper market share losses until then.

This was before Nokia said in December that it expected the phone market to shrink 5 per cent or more in 2009. Some analysts now expect sales to fall as much as 15 per cent from 2008. As a result of the deteriorating market, Deutsche Bank analyst Brian Modoff estimated that Motorola needed to cut costs by roughly another $650 million, on top of the $800 million reductions already announced.

"Their cost structure is too high for where they need to be in this environment given their market share," said Modoff, who sees Motorola reporting 22 million phone sales for the fourth quarter just ended, and 17 million for this quarter. He estimated that with its current cost structure Motorola could break even if it sold about 28 million phones per quarter, but said that this figure was too high for comfort in the weak economy.

"I think they need to be profitable below 20 million units," said Modoff. Analysts on average expect Nokia to report 121.5 million phone sales for the fourth quarter, with estimates ranging from 110 million to 135 million.

They expect Sony Ericsson, which overtook Motorola in the third quarter, to sell about 26.6 million phones. Phonescoop.com, a blog about the latest phones, said Motorola could lay off as many as 50 per cent of its mobile phone workers, but analysts said this would be a "drastic" move.

Charter Equity Research analyst Ed Snyder said such a cut would mean giving up workers in research and development, and "dramatically" reducing the number of phones launched. But he said that such a move was not implausible.

"They're hemorrhaging cash. They have to cut the division," he said. But Deutsche Bank's Modoff said Motorola needs to be careful about where it makes cuts because it needs to be able to compete with popular devices such as Apple Inc's iPhone and phones based on Android, the operating system designed by Google Inc.

These phones have made the focus of industry competition more about innovative software and user interfaces than about phone hardware."They should keep (jobs) in software and chop them in hardware. The emphasis needs to be placed on low cost designs and operating systems," said Modoff. In the third quarter, Motorola's mobile unit revenue fell 31 per cent to $3.1 billion, and the unit's operating loss widened to $840 million from $248 million.

Agencies