Singapore Airlines Group (SIA) has predicted robust passenger growth in its operating statistics for August 2022. SIA has continued to see strong passenger demand across all route regions except for East Asia where quarantine restrictions were imposed in some places. SIA, along with its flagship carrier Singapore Airlines and low-cost-carrier (LCC) Scoot, carried a total of 2.083 million passengers in August 2022, almost as same as July 2022.
“The SIA Group continued to see strong passenger demand across all route regions, it does appear that growth is beginning to slow and that it would require the North Asian countries like Japan and China to fully lift COVID travel restrictions before it can begin its next cycle of growth. On top of this, SIA may be facing its own resource limitations with regard to its ability to bring more aircraft online and staff shortages,” the airline said in a statement accompanying the report.
SIA’s capacity was 110.3% higher than the same August 2021 but rose only marginally by 1.1% compared with July 2022. Group capacity reached 68% of pre-COVID-19 levels during August 2022.
SIA said that it has observed stunning growth in passenger traffic as compared to previous year, boosting the number of passengers it flew by more than ten-fold.
In March 2022, before Singapore fully reopened its borders, SIA carried around 893,000 passengers but when borders opened in April, this skyrocketed to 1,452,000, a 62.6% increase. The number of passengers it carried continued to expand in the following months by 17.4%, 13.7% and between June and July, by 7.5%
The strong demand for seats on SIA's routes enabled the airline to report its best-ever first quarter performance this year with an operating profit of $379 million. It is also the second-best quarterly performance ever for the airline for Q1 2022.
Another factor playing to SIA's advantage was its ability to scale up flights quickly when borders reopened. Due to strong shareholders and financial institution backing, it managed to raise about $16 billion, including $10.7 bn from shareholders through the sale of shares and convertible bonds. As a result, it did not have to furlough as many staff as its regional peers nor sell aircraft to keep afloat, as some regional airlines had to do.
As the borders opened, there was soaring demand for inboard and outboard flights from Singapore, both from business and leisure travellers across all cabin types. At the same time, Southeast Asian airlines were not able to mount the same number of flights as before COVID, and European carriers were struggling with resource and manning problems, especially in their ground handling teams. This puts upward pressure on fares which benefited SIA tremendously.
In August 2022, SIA's passenger capacity reached 68% of pre-COVID levels. Passenger load factor (PLF) came in at 85.4% which was 2.0 percentage points lower on a month-on-month basis, and 67.9% points higher on a year-on-year basis.