SYDNEY: Australia’s Qantas Airways will not fly to Emirates’ Dubai hub from next year and instead re-establish its Singapore stopover, redrawing a five-year-old alliance with the Gulf carrier to focus on Asian demand.
Qantas had made Dubai its hub for European flights under a 10-year deal it agreed with Emirates in 2012, as Qantas’s loss-making international division struggled.
But since the alliance began, Australia’s biggest airline has turned the corner, cutting costs, hiking fares and returning record profits, allowing it to switch back to the Singapore hub its customers liked better.
“Our partnership has evolved to a point where Qantas no longer needs to fly its own aircraft through Dubai,” Qantas Chief Executive Officer Alan Joyce said in a statement, adding later in a conference call that the change will free up aircraft for “expansion into Asia”.
Qantas said on Thursday it is retaining its partnership with Emirates for another five years, but the Australian airline will return to flying its flagship Sydney-London “Kangaroo Route” via Singapore and increase capacity on Melbourne-Singapore flights. It will retain more than 100 code share destinations with Emirates.
“When Qantas did the deal with Emirates its international fortunes were not attractive...they weren’t negotiating from a strong position,” said Neil Hansford, who runs consultancy Strategic Aviation Solutions.
“Me and a million others never enjoyed hubbing at Dubai. Now they’re going back to the traditional route,” Hansford said. Australian travelers generally prefer stopovers in Southeast Asia compared to Dubai because of timezone differences.
Qantas had already flagged plans to switch capacity to Asia, when it said in April it would axe its Melbourne-Dubai-London flights operated in partnership with Emirates, and fly via Perth instead.
Dropping Dubai as a destination altogether frees extra Airbus A380 and A330 aircraft for flights to Asia, where the airline’s low-cost arm, Jetstar, already operates a sizeable network and Qantas sees growing demand.
“Asia is where the growth market is. By pulling out of Singapore they basically forsook that whole thing; this transforms things incredibly,” said Peter Harbison, a former Australian aviation trade negotiator and chairman of consultancy CAPA.
Qantas said it expected a benefit of more than A$80 million a year to the airline from fiscal 2019 from the renewed alliance. Emirates said it was mutually beneficial.
Revenue sharing arrangements for the next five years of the deal were confidential, but a “continuation of what we’ve been doing until now”, Joyce said.
The airlines’ alliance is subject to government and regulatory approval in Australia.
Singapore’s Changi Airport welcomed the deal and said it would increase weekly Australia-Singapore capacity by 5.5 percent. However, Qantas has flagged cutting out stopovers altogether on the Kangaroo Route and flying to London directly from 2022.
Qantas keeps alliance with Emirates but drops Dubai for Singapore
Qantas keeps alliance with Emirates but drops Dubai for Singapore
US imposes preliminary 126% tariffs on solar imports from India
RIYADH: The administration of US President Donald Trump has imposed preliminary tariffs of up to 146 percent on solar panels imported from India, Indonesia, and Laos, after concluding that these countries provided unfair support to their manufacturing sectors.
The move is expected to benefit US producers, but in turn, could raise costs for consumers, according to Bloomberg.
The US Department of Commerce said on Feb. 24 that the tariff rates reflect the level of support provided, at 126 percent on imports from India, between 86 percent and 143 percent on Indonesia, and 81 percent on Laos.
The US claims that this support allows foreign producers to sell their exports in the US market at prices below production costs, harming the competitiveness of domestic manufacturers.
While these tariffs are expected to favor domestic manufacturers, they will negatively affect US renewable energy project developers, who have long relied on low-cost foreign supplies, exacerbating uncertainty in a sector already influenced by fluctuating policies and regulatory decisions in Washington.
A different customs path for solar tariffs
These duties are separate from the broader global tariffs previously imposed by Trump, which the US Supreme Court overturned last week. Following the ruling, Trump introduced new tariffs of 10 percent, with a warning that they could rise to 15 percent.
Earlier this month, the president reached a bilateral trade agreement with India aimed at easing economic tensions between the two countries.
According to Bloomberg NEF data, India, Indonesia, and Laos accounted for 57 percent of US solar panel imports in the first half of 2025, with some project developers shifting to importing panels from these countries after Washington imposed high tariffs on four Southeast Asian countries that had once represented the largest share of imports.
Pressure on Indian manufacturers
Vikram Bagri, an analyst at Citi, wrote in a research note on Feb. 24 that the relatively high tariff levels will make the US market almost closed to solar panel manufacturers in India.
The US solar industry group, the Alliance for American Solar Manufacturing and Trade, had requested the Department of Commerce to open an investigation into the support, arguing that the step was necessary to protect the domestic industry.
Tim Brightbill, co-chair of the international trade practice at Wiley Rein and the alliance’s lead attorney, said: “The results announced today represent a pivotal step toward restoring fair competition in the US solar market.”
He added: “US manufacturers are investing billions of dollars to rebuild production capacity domestically and create well-paying jobs. These investments cannot succeed if unfairly traded imports continue to distort the market.”
The Department of Commerce is expected to issue a final decision on the investigation on July 6, while a parallel probe is underway to impose anti-dumping duties on solar cell imports from India, Indonesia, and Laos.
