Cathay Pacific Seeks Regional Jets And Freighters For Growth
Cathay Pacific is in discussions to acquire more regional and freighters to fuel growth in the coming years.
During a 25 November analyst call, the group's chief customer and commercial officer Ronald Lam, who will assume the chief executive role in January, confirmed plans to introduce more regional aircraft and said the group was "running an RFP [request for proposal] and in regular discussions with the OEMs".
The group is also "actively" working with OEMs to acquire freighters "coming up after 2025", says Lam.
He did not disclose how many aircraft the group intends to order.
Lam says the group has sufficient long-haul passenger aircraft to fuel growth plans "for the coming years", citing incoming deliveries of Airbus A350s and Boeing 777-9s.
The group's 777-300ERs will remain in operation. Cirium fleets data shows this type to be the most common in its fleet: it has 41 777-300ERs ranging between seven and 15 years old.
It has 49 aircraft on order: 21 777-9s, to be delivered from 2025 onwards; three A350s, arriving in December, October and November 2023, respectively; and 25 A321neos.
The group says it is charting passenger capacity recovery "in a measured and responsible way", targeting one-third of pre-pandemic levels by year-end, "about 70%" by end-2023 and full recovery by end-2024.
Cargo capacity is set to reach two-thirds by year-end.
Low-cost subsidiary HK Express is working to fully recover pre-pandemic flight capacity by March 2023.
Lam says the group does not expect any significant recovery in Chinese mainland flight capacity "unless there is relaxation on allowing more capacity to those airports as well as relaxation of the transit restrictions into the Chinese mainland".
In terms of transit travel, the group is seeing "strong demand" for outbound travel from the Chinese mainland connecting to Hong Kong and onward to other destinations, but is "heavily constrained" on terms of inbound demand to the Chinese mainland.
The group expects its second-half results to show a "marked improvement" over the first-half, but will still remain lossmaking for the full year. Its first-half net loss came in at HK$5 billion.