Cathay Pacific's passenger traffic just 1% of usual after 'drastic' drop

A Cathay Pacific passenger airplane on a runway in Hong Kong on March 10, 2020. PHOTO: AFP

HONG KONG (BLOOMBERG) - Cathay Pacific Airways expects passenger numbers to stay below 1,000 a day this month compared with the usual 100,000 as it operates at just 3 per cent of normal capacity.

The Hong Kong carrier said it is impossible to predict when demand will improve, as the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic is intensifying. On one day earlier this week, Cathay Pacific and Cathay Dragon carried only 302 passengers.

The company's dire outlook came as it released figures for March that showed "drastic decreases" in passengers. The airline and Cathay Dragon carried a total of 311,128 passengers last month, down 90 per cent from March 2019. Revenue passenger kilometres tumbled 84.3 per cent and passenger load factor dropped to 49.3 per cent. For the quarter, passengers were down 52 per cent from a year earlier.

"Passenger demand dropped rapidly and tremendously in late March following the introduction of arrival restrictions on all non-resident visitors to Hong Kong, including transit passengers," Cathay Pacific's chief customer and commercial officer Ronald Lam said in a statement. "On each of the last two days of March we carried fewer than 1,000 passengers only."

"In April and May, we will be operating a bare skeleton passenger flight schedule," Mr Lam said. "We are doing everything we can to reduce our expenditure and preserve cash for the coming months."

In April 2019, Cathay Pacific and Cathay Dragon carried 3.1 million passengers.

The airline said earlier this week that it will no longer impose fuel surcharges on most flights from May 1. Cathay Pacific was already struggling from the impact of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong last year, and has warned that it faces a substantial loss in the first half of this year.

Cathay Pacific made an unaudited loss of more than HK$2 billion (S$368 million) in February alone due to disruption from the coronavirus.

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