Dubai-based Emirates airline plans to stay outside of global airline alliances but is open to bilateral partnerships, a company executive said in a newspaper interview Tuesday. "Our strategy hasn't shifted," Emirates' Executive Vice President Thierry Antinori told the online newspaper Latribune.fr. "We don't want to enter a global alliance like Star Alliance, Skyteam or Oneworld which would be a brake to our development," he added.

Instead he said Emirates sees "major partnerships between major actors" as the strategy for the future. "Our strategy is simply to fill out our network by concluding agreements with companies that cover best the part of the network we want to develop," Antinori explained. He said Emirates had no fixed objective in the number of partnerships it concludes, which don't involve making capital investments. Emirates already has bilateral co-operation arrangements with Australia's Qantas and low-cost carrier EasyJet.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2012