The silver lining: Number of SIA passengers inches up in May

Finally, here’s some good news for SIA.

SIA is suffering from stiff competition and the aviation industry’s generally gloomy outlook for the year. But the beleaguered airline still registered a 3.5% increase for the number of passengers carried in May, according to SIA’s monthly operating report.

There were more than 1.52m passengers who rode SIA last month, a noticeable increase from May 2013’s 1.47m riders. Last month’s figure is only slightly lower than April 2014’s 1.53m passengers.

According to the report, “In May 2014, Singapore Airlines' systemwide passenger carriage (measured in revenue passenger kilometres) increased 2.5% on the back of 2.0% capacity injection (measured in available seat kilometres). Consequently, passenger load factor (PLF) improved 0.3 percentage points to 74.9%. The number of passengers carried increased by 3.5% year-on-year to 1.5 million.”

Here’s more from SIA:

PLF improved across all route regions, except for East Asia. Europe and Southwest Pacific absorbed capacity injection well, while loads to Americas and West Asia and Africa improved on the back of capacity reduction.

PLF for the East Asia region declined due to softer demand to Bangkok. The operating environment continues to remain challenging.

Capacity will continue to be adjusted accordingly to better match market demand and promotional activities shall continue in markets that require additional support.

Overall cargo load factor in May 2014 increased by 0.9 percentage points year-on-year to 62.9%. Cargo traffic (measured in freight-tonne-kilometres) was 0.1% lower compared with capacity reduction of 1.6%.

Load factors were higher on all route regions, except for South West Pacific region where cargo traffic was weaker and did not match the increase in capacity.