AirAsia X CEO Update

Transcript

Benyamin Ismail:Well, the expectations has gone ahead of expectations in terms of especially on our flights up to October, we're pretty much sold out. But predominantly a lot of those passengers are coming from Japan. I would say about 80% is from Japan. But what surprised me the most is, you know, there's been quite a bit of demand coming out of ASEAN via Kuala Lumpur, which is great. So people are willing to do either a one-stop or a two-stop just to go to Honolulu. But I think a lot of work needs to be done out of US, especially Hawaii. I think, you know, we're just in the midst of, you know, I guess doing a lot of marketing, visibility, branding. So I think that will take a bit of time, but I'm quite optimistic that we will be a success there. Well, I think at the moment we're still analyzing. It's not priority for us. I mean, for me at the moment is really to look at all my regional flying in terms of 6 to 8 hours region. But of course, we need to see whether what I actually aircraft are available. We're still studying it, but it's not a priority at the moment. Well, China has been actually part of my key strategies to grow. We've been putting a lot of capacity into China. Just recently, we just started Wuhan on a daily basis. We've increased capacity in Beijing to double dailies. We've increased to Shanghai to about 11 times. There are a few more routes that's up my sleeves, probably 2 more routes in China. We're just getting the regulatory approvals for that. But I think China is a very dynamic market. Outbound traffic, it's very strong. But again, you know, the second-tier cities as we are looking at it now, it's averaging about 30 to 40 million population. So I think it's, it's a no-brainer for us to, to, to, to, to explore China. So we'll see. Give us a few months. There'll be some announcements and hopefully hope for the best. Well, a lot of it is driven by discipline. We've gone a lot for the last 2 years. It's always been about cost cutting, not cost cutting to impact operations, but really just to trim all the fat that was in the business. So that gives us the ability to make more margins in terms of profitability. And I guess the last thing is really to drive yields up. We've been, you know, on the high, moving yields up quite considerably. And a lot of that is driven by, you know, a very well-planned commercial team that goes into developing new markets, finding ways to bring outbound and inbound into those markets. So that's been a success. So really, I think It's a combination of reducing costs and increasing yields, so that's been the key for us. Hong Kong is just not one, there are also a few other routes that we may look at. They are airports where we feel that, you know, there's no more capacity in terms of smaller aircraft to go in, so potentially we may come in to grow that market through wider-body operations. One example that we've just started where we're flying less than 4 hours is Bali. Already the short-haul guys fly about 6 to 7 times a day, We are flying another day, another flight on the wider body, so, and the sales for that have been great. So we know that Bali is starved for capacity, and we brought in a wider body just to add that spice to it. So we're doing very well on that. So we may look at other routes as well, Hong Kong and a few others, so we'll see. What are the key factors that you think have made AirAsia X such a success?

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