Air India chief executive officer Campbell Wilson said the integration of the core reservation and passenger-facing systems of Air India Express and AirAsia India “marks a significant milestone in the Air India Group’s transformation journey”.

“This new Air India Express, operating both domestically and internationally using systems optimised for low-cost airlines, gives the Group a much stronger LCC platform. Together with the Group’s recent, benchmark-setting aircraft order, this sets the scene for us to realise many new opportunities for customers, employees and Indian aviation,” he said, according to the statement.

This system merger comes five months after AirAsia India was fully acquired and subsidiarised under Air India, and three months after both AirAsia India and Air India Express were placed under a single CEO. The airlines will continue integrating other internal systems and, eventually, their air operating permits and regulatory posts.

AirAsia India flies to 19 destinations across the country while Air India Express operates to 14 international destinations from 19 Indian cities

Wilson said integration of Air India Express and Air India will bring revenue, cost, and operational benefits through broader adoption of each airlines’ best practices, systems, and routes, and confer greater economies of scale.

The new Air India Express will focus on leisure-oriented and price sensitive markets while improving connectivity between key domestic cities and Air India’s fast expanding international network. This migration, which largely involved Air India Express migrating to the systems used by AirAsia India, confers significant capability and efficiency benefits for the airline and passengers.

The world’s largest food group was a client of Credit Suisse, Schneider told broadcaster TeleZueri in an interview to be shown on Tuesday evening, and had been following the collapse of Switzerland’s second-biggest bank.

“We have worked closely with Credit Suisse for many decades in a spirit of trust,” Schneider told the broadcaster.

“You can see from such an example that Switzerland as a business location and a financial centre are very closely linked. We now have to see how to reorganise our banking relationships, both with Swiss and international providers.”

Schneider said the intervention by the Swiss government, the central bank and financial market regulator to engineer a merger with UBS had stabilised the situation and restored confidence.

Speaking about Nestle, Schneider said the company had made a good start to 2023, although further price rises by the company were likely, Schneider said, to offset inflation of raw material costs.

The maker of Nescafe instant coffee and KitKat chocolate bars raised prices by 8.2% last year, but that did not fully offset the impact of increased ingredient costs on margins.

Price increases had so far only had a “very limited” impact on consumer spending, Schneider said.

“As inflation continues, and then also affects our own profitability, we will have to adjust prices,” Schneider said.

“We will continue to do this in a responsible way, we don’t want to be a price driver. We respond to inflation, we don’t fuel it,” he said.

The food maker was also working on savings to reach its goal for a full-year underlying trading operating profit margin target of between 17% and 17.5% , Schneider added.