MAHB’s current passenger traffic to provide strong base for revenue increase

KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia Airports Holdings Bhd’s (MAHB) current momentum of passengers’ traffic will continue to provide a strong base for incremental revenue generation moving forward.

“We opine that the current momentum of passengers’ traffic will continue to provide a strong base for incremental revenue generation moving forward.

“This will be supported by accommodative visa policies in Malaysia for tourists from China and India which will temper the pressure from the impending international departure levy,” said the research team at MIDF Amanah Investment Bank Bhd (MIDF Research) in a corporate update.

It also highlighted that other growth factors would include direct connectivity seen from international airlines flight straight to locations such as Langkawi.

“As such, we strongly believe that MAHB passenger numbers can surpass the 100 million mark in 2019, while maintaining a relatively conservative growth rate of 3.5 per cent which translates to 102.5 million passengers.

“Even if there was no growth in the last four months of 2019, we are confident that the passenger traffic will be in excess of 100 million passengers,” it said.

The research team noted that in August 2019, passenger traffic for MAHB airports (excluding ISGA) increased by 9.2 per cent year-on-year (y-o-y) to 9.2 million passengers.

“This was the highest passenger traffic recorded thus far in 2019 and marked the third consecutive month in which traffic was above nine million passengers,” it added.