Southeast Asia’s largest budget airline by fleet size, AirAsia Bhd said it carried 4.82 million passengers in the first quarter (Q1) of its financial year ended Dec 31, 2012 (FY12), up 12 per cent from 4.32 million in the previous corresponding period.
It recorded a strong load factor of 80 per cent for the period, the same as in Q1 FY11, on the back of a 12 per cent increase in capacity.
“The strong traffic was due to spillover from a strong fourth quarter of the previous financial year especially with the introduction of new routes from Kuala Lumpur (KL) to Danang in December last year."
"For the first quarter of this year, we introduced the KL-Semarang, KL-Surat Thani and KL-Palembang,” AirAsia said in a statement today.
The company said it also strengthened its foothold in East Malaysia by increasing its KL-Kota Kinabalu frequency to 14 times daily.
Revenue passenger kilometres, a measure of the volume of passengers carried by the airline rose nine per cent to 5.55 billion from 5.11 billion in the previous corresponding period.
AirAsia has a fleet of 57 aircraft as at end-March this year compared to 53 a year ago.
According to AirAsia, its Thai and Indonesian associates also carried higher number of passengers for the first quarter.
Thai AirAsia's load factor increased to 87 per cent from 84 per cent previously and the airline carried 17 per cent more passengers totalling 2.13 million compared with 1.82 million in Q1 FY11.
Meanwhile, Indonesia AirAsia saw an increase of 16 per cent in passengers carried to 1.273 million from 1.09 million in Q1 FY11 while its load factor fell to 77 per cent from 79 per cent.
"This was due to increased capacity of 19 per cent year-on-year whereby it looked at strengthening other hubs like Surabaya," AirAsia said. -- BERNAMA
Source: www.btimes.com.my
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