Hong Kong Airport’s Passenger and Cargo Traffic continues Decline in October 2008

Hong Kong International Airport handled 4.1 million passengers and 320,000 tonnes of cargo in October 2008, a 1.4% and 9.2% reduction respectively, from the same month last year. Air traffic movements grew 1% to 26,035.

October 2008 saw declines in visitor traffic particularly from the Mainland, SE Asia, North America and Europe, while transfer / transit passengers showed a moderate increase compared to the same month last year. Cargo traffic showed an across-the-board drop with import / export figures decreasing more than 10%. Transshipment recorded a relatively mild decrease.

Stanley Hui Hon-chung, Chief Executive Officer of the Airport Authority, said, “The global financial turmoil is biting deeper into world economies while business and trade activities are appreciably slowing down. These conditions have contributed to the continuous decline in passenger and cargo traffic that began in August. Given the current market environment, we have revised our traffic forecast for calendar year 2008 with passenger throughput and aircraft movements still expected to see marginal increases while cargo traffic will likely register negative growth.”

“Contraction in air cargo volume is particularly prominent,” Mr Hui added. “Global demand for Asian / Mainland Chinese products have dwindled substantially because of the worsening economies of major trading partners like the US and Europe. As a result, trading activities between Asia and the rest of the world are rapidly slowing down, which has had an unavoidable impact on HK’s air cargo business.”

Air traffic figures for the first 10 months of this year recorded moderate growth over the same period in 2007. Passenger volume rose 3.2% to 40.7 million, while cargo throughput and air traffic movements grew 1.6% and 2.9% to 3.1 million tonnes and 251,720 movements, respectively.

On a rolling 12-month basis ending 31 October 2008, HKIA served a total of 49 million passengers, 3.8 million tonnes of cargo and 302,460 aircraft movements. These figures represent year-on-year increases of 4.2%, 2.4% and 3.4% respectively.

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