SpiceJet shares sky-rocketed on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) even as rivals Jet Airways (full service carrier) and IndiGo-parent Interglobe Aviation were trading with minor gains or losses. SpiceJet shares rose almost 6.50 percent to hit intraday high of Rs 66.50, while Interglobe was flat at Rs 924 and Jet Airways was up 0.55 percent at Rs 418.
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Trading volumes for SpiceJet were also high, with 53.95 lakh shares exchanging hands by around 3.22 pm as against the two-week average of 27.27 lakh shares.
All the three carriers are yet to announce their December quarter (Q3) results. Jet Airways will be declaring on February 3 while Interglobe has fixed January 31 for the announcement.
Indian aviation companies have been posting robust growth for the past many months in the domestic market and were unaffected even by the demonetisation-induced disruption witnessed by other sectors such as automobile and fast-moving consumer goods.
Air India, IndiGo, SpiceJet, Jet Airways, Go Air, AirAsia India and Vistara flew about 95.2 lakh (about 9.5 million) passengers during December last year, an increase of 23.10 percent over the corresponding month in the previous calender year.
According to data released by India's civil aviation regulator, domestic carriers flew about 998.88 lakh passengers between the January to December 2016 period, when compared to 810.91 lakh passengers flown in the same time period in the previous year (2015).
Low-cost carrier IndiGo (owned by Interglobe Aviation) witnessed its market share fall significantly to 40.3 percent in December from 42.1 percent in the preceding month. SpiceJet also registered a negligible decrease in its market share to 12.7 percent last month, when compared to 12.8 percent in November.
State-owned carrier Air India saw its market share improving to 14 percent from 12.9 percent in November 2016.
Full service carrier Jet Airways' market share climbed to 15.3 percent from 14.9 percent in November. On the other hand, budget carrier Go Air's share also rose to 8.2 percent in December, from eight percent in the previous month.
Other domestic carriers such as AirAsia India and Vistara saw a 0.2 increase in their market shares respectively.
The BSE Sensex was trading with gains for the fourth straight day ahead of Budget 2017 to be presented on February 1 by finance minister Arun Jaitley.
