Hong Kong airlines Cathay Pacific and Dragonair posted a marginal decrease in cargo and mail uplifted in March compared to a year ago, but this was a better performance over February 2016.
The sister airlines together carried 157,006 tonnes of cargo and mail in March, a drop of 0.4% compared to the same month last year. The cargo and mail load factor fell by 5.4 percentage points to 63.0%. Capacity, measured in available cargo/mail tonne kilometers, increased by 4.1% while cargo and mail revenue tonne kilometers (RTKs) fell by 4.1%.
In the first quarter of the year, the tonnage carried fell by 3.1% against a 2.6% increase in capacity and a 4.8% drop in RTKs.
“Following a generally weak February, we saw some improvement in airfreight demand in March,” said Mark Sutch, Cathay Pacific general manager for cargo sales & marketing.
He ascribed the growth to the shipment of new consumer IT products out of the major manufacturing cities of Western China, a pickup in traffic on key trans-Pacific routes, and the addition of flights to India in response to continued robust demand.
“Overall, however, the air cargo markets remain soft and yield remains under pressure in what is a highly competitive environment,” he said.
Slight traffic rise for HKIA
In related developments, Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA) saw its cargo throughput in March post mild growth of 1.1% year-on-year to 368,000 tonnes.
The growth was primarily due to a 5% expansion in exports and a 3% growth in transshipments. Among the key trading regions, traffic to and from India and Australasia increased most significantly during the month.
In the first quarter of 2016, HKIA’s cargo throughput declined 3.5% from the same period in 2015 to 987,000 tonnes. On a rolling 12-month basis, cargo throughput dropped by 1.4% to 4.34 million tonnes.
Photo: Ralf Roletschek
