Cathay Pacific cargo outpaces passenger growth for April

Moving into the second quarter of 2016, Cathay Pacific Airways cargo operations returned to growth, with year-over-year traffic increases that outpaced capacity expansion.

Traffic rose by 0.6 percent, to 854,000 revenue tonne kilometers (RTKs), while available tonne kilometers (ATKs) fell 0.8 percent, to 1.345 million. Tonnage, meanwhile, rose 2.1 percent to 148,000 tonnes.

Although cargo tonnage, YTD, is still down 3.4 percent as a result of skewed annual comparisons from the West Coast port disruptions in 2015 which drove up volumes last year, April could mark a turning point. Cathay Pacific general manager cargo sales & marketing, Mark Sutch said, “April saw a better-than-expected performance for our cargo business, at least in terms of tonnage. We managed capacity astutely and were able to capture shipments out of key markets, including Mainland China and India, which led to a small improvement in load factor. India remains a focus for our cargo business at the moment and we operated a number of additional services to and from the country in April in response to strong demand.”

Although volumes and traffic started to improve, Sutch warned, “The big issue at the moment is yield, which remains under intense pressure due to the overall softness of the markets and the big increase in competitor capacity.”