Chinese New Year a bonus for Cathay

David Badger | Mon, 12 Mar 2012

Hong Kong carriers see air freight traffic rise, but are not getting excited

Cathay Pacific and sister carrier Dragonair saw air cargo and mail traffic show a slight increase in February over the same month last year.

The two Hong Kong-based airlines carried 117,880 tonnes of cargo and mail last month, a rise of 0.8% on February 2011.

However, for the year to date, tonnage has declined by 10.4%, while capacity has dropped by 1.6%.

February?s? cargo and mail load factor was down by 1.8 percentage points to 65.8%. Capacity, measured in available freight tonne kilometres, rose by 4.7%, while flown FTK grew by 2%.
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Cathay Pacific General Manager Cargo Sales & Marketing James Woodrow said: ?On the surface the February cargo figures look reasonably okay, but comparisons with 2011 are distorted by the Chinese New Year effect.

?Our key markets remained soft, with weak demand to Europe in particular, out of Hong Kong and Shanghai.

?We continued to manage capacity in line with demand, which helped to keep load factors reasonably stable.

?At the end of February, demand out of Hong Kong and mainland China did improve due to large project shipments.?

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Source: http://www.ifw-net.com/freightpubs/ifw/article.htm?artid=20017945386&src=rss

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