Airline-Owned SITA Seeks to Ride a Software Boom to Lift Sales
Photo Credit: Barbara Dalibard, CEO of SITA (Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautiques), spoke in September 2019 at the World Aviation Festival in London. SITA
Skift Take
It's glamorous to be a turnaround artist who parachutes into a troubled company and restores growth. But change can be slow and painful. Just ask Barbara Dalibard, the CEO of SITA, the airline-controlled tech provider.
Tech provider SITA (Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautiques), which was created seven decades ago by 11 airlines, is struggling through a sluggish stretch. While CEO Barbara Dalibard has been revving up its metabolism since she joined in June 2016, the company hasn't yet found a fix to its troubled passenger service system.
SITA last year returned to revenue growth. It boosted its revenue 4 percent year-over-year to $1.7 billion as a consolidated group, it recently revealed. In the past, the private company has disclosed its consolidated group profit or cash flow. But this year it didn't.
“So far, so good,” Dalibard said of the turnaround. “2017 and 2018 were good years. This year, we’re slightly winning market share.”
In theory, Dalibard reports to the more than 400 airlines and airports who pay to be members.
In practice, some players own more of SITA than others. Shares are redistributed across members each year based on the business the
