KUALA LUMPUR (Oct 10): The number of passengers passing through the 39 airports Malaysia Airports Holdings Bhd (MAHB) manages in the country in September rose 7.6% year-on-year (y-o-y), thanks to an increase in the average load factor for both domestic and international sectors.
MAHB said the impact from the haze was minimal.
The airport operator handled 8.35 million passengers in September compared with 7.76 million passengers a year earlier, according to a filing with Bursa Malaysia today.
International and domestic passenger movements increased by 3.6% and 11.9% respectively over September 2018.
Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) handled 4.91 million passengers in September, a growth of 6.1% from 4.63 million passengers recorded a year ago. Out of this, KLIA Main Terminal handled 2.34 million passengers in September, up 7.3% y-o-y, while klia2 handled 5% more passengers at 2.57 million — surpassing KLIA Main Terminal's passenger traffic for September.
Overall, aircraft movements at the Malaysian airports rose 3.7% y-o-y to 74,050 in September, with international and domestic movements registering an increase of 0.8% and 5.7% respectively.
Overall average load factor was 72.4% in September, an increase of 2.1 percentage points over September 2018.
Systemwide, including its Istanbul operations in Turkey, MAHB handled 6.2% more passengers at 11.5 million in September, compared with 10.83 million a year ago.
International passenger movements rose 6.9% y-o-y to 5.4 million in September, while domestic passenger movements increased by 5.6% y-o-y to 6.1 million.
Istanbul Sabiha Gokcen International Airport's (SGIA) passenger traffic grew 2.7% y-o-y to 3.15 million in September, as it saw international traffic increase by 19.3% y-o-y, which was offset by a 6.3% decline in domestic passenger movements.
For the first nine months of 2019, passenger traffic at the 39 airports grew 5.9% to 77.96 million from 73.62 million a year ago.
Moving forward, in view of the optimism as well as positive average load factors for the third quarter of 2019, MAHB expects to achieve the targeted traffic numbers for all of 2019.
"The domestic traffic correction and consolidation are expected to continue at least until 1Q 2020, while the international sector could see further improvement. Nevertheless, challenges and uncertainties continue to remain with respect to airlines performance, competition in the domestic environment as well as the local and global macroeconomic outlook.
"SGIA recorded further consolidation of its international traffic. This on-going structural change is a positive development in view of the capacity challenges at ISGA. As reported before, the airport is geared to meet its targeted growth with better performance of the international sector," it added.
Source: The Edge Markets