SIA reports muted combined operating stats for Jan and Feb

 The bright spot was that Silkair's numbers showed good growth of 13-14%  in passenger carriage while load factor only declined marginally.

SIA reported operating statistics for February. Passengercarriage at the core SIA passenger segment rose by 6.8% y- o-y to 6,808.6m passenger-km on 5.4% increase in capacity, resulting in a 1ppt improvement in load factor to 76.1%. Cargo carriage was higher by 7.1% y-o-y to 543m tonne-km on 6.9% increase in capacity, which led to a 0.1ppt improvement in load factor to 61.9%.

Taking the combined results for Jan and Feb (to adjust for the earlier CNY effect), Paul Yong, analyst at DBS Vickers notes that passenger carriage rose by 4.4% y-o-y on 4.6% increase in capacity, while load factor declined marginally by 0.1ppt to 76.6% for the combined two months.

 Combined cargo carriage declined 3.4% yoy on 1.3% decrease in capacity, which implies that cargo load factor fell by 1.4ppt to 60.2%.