آیا درآمد تجاری برای ارائه دهندگان سرویس ناوبری اروپایی امروز مهم است؟  Are commercial revenues important to today’s European air navigation service providers?

1. Introduction While commercial revenues of airports have been studied in several papers – Graham (2009), Tovar and Martín-Cejas (2009), Castillo-Manzano (2010), Kratzsch and Sieg (2011), Fuerst et al. (2011), Lin and Chen (2013), Olariaga (2015) – commercial revenues of air navigation service providers (ANSPs) are ignored by current aviation research. Commercial revenues of ANSPs are not mentioned in CANSO (2014) Global Air Navigation Services Performance Report at all and although Eurocontrol (2015) ATM CostEfficiency 2013 Benchmarking Report contains information about so called other revenues of ANSPs (and the other revenue components as well), it does not provide any deeper analysis of commercial revenues. Papers devoted to the benchmarking of European ANSPs written by Mouchart and Simar (2003), Button and Neiva (2014), Bilotkach et al. (2015) did not use revenues (including commercial ones) as an output, thus leaving the revenue side of the ANSPs business untouched. Only Arnaldo et al. (2014) included income from charges and other revenues as outputs in the benchmarking of ANSPs. However, they were not interested more in the role of commercial revenues in the ANSPs performance. There are several reasons why commercial revenues of ANSPs are not present as an issue in current aviation research. In the past, ANSPs were managed and operated as public utility entities – monopolists on geographical markets copying state borders. As public utility entities, they were focused on the delivery of air navigation services (ANS) in the public, and not commercial, interest. The processes of corporatisation and commercialisation of ANSPs started later in comparison with airports, and privatisation of ANSPs is still rare all over the world. That is why corporatisation, commercialisation and privatisation of ANSPs could not boost commercial revenues at the level recorded for the majority of corporatised, commercialised and privatised airports. Moreover, ANS have a specific nature if we compare them with airport services. While airport activities and airport aeronautical services (or at least some of them) are directly connected to passengers, ANS are predominantly delivered to airspace users. This does not enable ANSPs to exploit the potential of passengers to generate revenues of a commercial nature. However, on the other hand ANS can be (at least potentially) delivered to other ANSPs or other subjects on a commercial basis, if national regulation allows it and such demand exits. The commercial potential of ANS relates not only to core ANS (such as terminal control services within Air Traffic Management – ATM), but also to support ANS services (Communication, Navigation and Surveillance e CNS; Meteorological Services for Air Navigation e MES; Aeronautical Information Services e AIS; Search andRescue e SAR) and to supplementary services (training, consultations, projects, publications etc.) as well. A new situational context in which ANSPs run their business at present – competition of some ANSPs on the market for en-route services in fragmented world regions, deregulation of terminal control services in some countries, pressure on the ANSPs cost ef- ficiency from air carriers driven by sharpening competition among them, capital intensity of the ANS production driven by new technologies, deficits in public budgets, etc. (Tomova, 2015
) e encourage ANSPs to conduct their business in a more commercial way. In the European Union, where, under the common European performance scheme and common charging system, the potential profit of ANSPs is regulated, the issue of commercial revenues acquires attention as a regulatory problem1 – and in the long-term perspective – as a structural problem taking into account more radical structural changes towards more liberalisation, as projected by the European Commission.