We'll now open the floor to questions. If you would like to ask a question, please raise your hand. I'll call on you, and one of our colleagues will hand you a microphone. Please state your name, organization, before asking the question. Okay, please go ahead. Any questions from the floor? Gentlemen in the front.
Thanks, Andy, and thank you Ronald and Chris for the opportunity to ask a question. Maybe I would just start by talking about some of the constraints that we see in 2023, and I'll just touch on three, and maybe you could cover them off. First one would be, as you relaunch your schedules back. Oh, sorry. By the way, I'm Tim Bacchus from Bloomberg Intelligence. The Chinese airports and their readiness to sort of accept the recovery of the flight schedules back into China. I've noted other airlines in the regions have talked about how there may be some constraints in terms of re-adding capacity back to China. Second constraint maybe you could cover off would be OEMs and the suppliers in terms of the delays.
We note from many airlines around the world, they talk about we're looking at six, nine-month type delays in terms of aircraft deliveries. I note you've got something like, nine aircraft maybe still to go this year, two already delivered. Are you very confident sort of in the CapEx and the aircraft delivery schedules you see there? The last constraint really would be just, I think, just on the, just overall adding ASK capacity back. When I look at other airlines in Asia Pacific in terms of how they're, you know, restoring flight schedules, it seems that Cathay Pacific is quite conservative, you know, looking at only 70% by the end of this year, whereas others have gotten to 80%, 90%, I think, more quickly.
Just, you can talk about how, you know, your own staffing and readiness is to bring those aircraft and ASKs back. Thanks.
Thank you for the questions. Well, first of all, I would like to go back to the background of what we face in Hong Kong and what Cathay has faced in the past three years. First of all, we didn't have a domestic market that doesn't require crossing a border, right? That's quite unique because although we have a domestic market flying back to Chinese mainland, but there was a border, and as we all know, that border only opened recently. Also, the other unique challenge we were facing during the pandemic was that our Hong Kong-based air crew were subject to very stringent quarantine requirements. For most other airlines, they didn't have this issue, and throughout the pandemic, they were able to keep a basic capacity, whether it's due to the domestic market or lack of a crew quarantine.
Whereas in our case, our schedule at some point for a long time was only less than 5%. That 5% has created a lot of challenges to our crew resources. For example, for the pilot, if they are not able to fly for a certain period of time, their license would run out of recency. Other airlines did not have this issue, and we have to retrain our pilots in order to rebuild the capacity. As of today, we are still having a lot of training that we need to do. I think in summary, I would say for the environment we face, we started low because of the crew quarantine constraint. Also, as we all know, I think relative to many cities, I think Hong Kong were the later ones to open up.
We've also started late. Within that context, I wouldn't say Cathay is more conservative than other airlines. In fact, I would say in terms of the pace of build up of the capacity, given where we started, we are actually faster than many other airlines in our pickup. I wanna put the 70% passenger capacity by end of this year into this context for us to better understand the situation. We started late, we started low, but we are catching up as fast as we could, and in many cases, faster than other airlines. In terms of your two other question, yes, I think rightly pointed out as like many other airlines in the world, we face different constraint in terms of operation and capital investment. It's not a issue unique to Hong Kong or unique to Cathay.
If you look around the ecosystem across the whole world, many airports, many airlines are still short of resources. We're now doing our best to rebuild that manpower. As we mentioned in our presentation, at least first of all, the attrition rate across all staff group have become normal, but we still have a big task to do in terms of recruitment and training. Against our plan, I would say so far so good. We are on track despite all the challenges. Yeah. Thank you.
Next.
Hi, I'm Lorraine from ANZ. I have a question on your liquidity, on page 21, so that you don't have to show it again going forward. What's your target level of liquidity going forward? Would it be back to 2019 or somewhere in between?
Well, it really depends on how the business goes and our liquidity performance goes, cash flow performance goes in the next few months. I think overall, I don't have a specific figure that I can share. Overall, yes, I think we are looking to return to a more normal level by the end of this year. As Chris mentioned, the insurance comes with a cost, and with the uncertainty reducing throughout this year, certainly we will want to reduce our liquidity balance to a more normal level so that it will help our reduce our interest expenses as well. Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you. Next? Okay. Lady in the back.
Hi, it's Cathy Chung here from Citi. Can we hear a bit more about your GBA strategy? You mentioned about seeing that as your extended home market. How much of that maybe perhaps is included in your strategy to recover your pre-COVID capacity, or whether you see that as more upside, as well as how you see the overall competitive landscape in that area?
Sure. As I mentioned, the Greater Bay Area, the nine cities in mainland, in the Guangdong province, is one of our key focus in developing. I think overall, I would say the strategy comes with a few parts. First of all, we need to invest in our brand, across the Greater Bay Area market. We have a strong brand traditionally in those market, but as we all know, I think there's a up-and-coming young population there, so some of the older people probably will remember very well about Cathay Pacific's legacy, but we need to now capture the heart and minds of the younger audience that we have in the Greater Bay Area market. That's number one. Number two is the connectivity between the Greater Bay Area and Hong Kong International Airport.
On that front, we've been making a lot of development, some of which I've already mentioned in my presentation. Basically, we want to connect people from GBA seamlessly by air, by sea, by land, into HKIA. Our preferred mode is that they can go directly into the Shekou of our airport, so that they don't need to cross the border and enter Hong Kong, they themselves as well as their baggage. We are making headway, as I mentioned in my earlier presentation, to make the experience more seamless. We also want to penetrate our people and capability. In fact, in the last year or so, I think we have been expanding our team capabilities in the Greater Bay Areas.
We got a new office, a start-up style office in Shenzhen as our GBA head office. We want to treat also the Greater Bay Area as our extended home head office as well. We're gonna be paying a lot more visits into the Greater Bay Area as if they are our home head office as well. I do believe that the Greater Bay Area market will both help us in our rebuild towards our pre-pandemic capacity because they are a big source of demand for us. As well as a driving force for upside post Three-runway System to support the demand side for the longer term future as well.
Therefore, I think we are very focused in capturing the market, for us in, both in the short run as well as in the long run. Yeah. Thank you.
Ronald, thank you. Perhaps we can switch to the questions from our webcast audience. First question from HSBC. What is the view on the bridge loan from the Hong Kong Government? What is the view on the dividend distribution and potential redemption of the preference shares? Ronald, please.
Yeah. Thank you. Well, first of all, once again, I would like to express our deep appreciation for the Hong Kong Government's support to us over the pandemic. In particular, the recapitalisation plan back in 2020 was very important for our business to keep going throughout the pandemic. In terms of the preference share, we have every intention, when our operations allows, we will redeem the preference share in full. In terms of the dividends for the preference share, as we all know, we now have accumulated up to HKD 1.5 billion outstanding dividend payment. We have intention and plan to pay up to the preference share dividend within this year.
I think we have to see, with the positive momentum we have seen in our business, we are more confident about being able to repay the preference share as well as the dividend in the coming years. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you. We've got a question from DBS, actually similar questions from Citigroup as well, let's address them together. The question is basically, can you shed more colors on the passenger view outlook? Do you see the mix between leisure and corporate changing going forward? Thank you.
Well, it's still early days because Hong Kong only opened up in the fourth quarter of last year, and Chinese Mainland only opened up in first quarter of this year. The situation is still a bit dynamic. Personally, I'm confident that both the corporate and leisure travel will return. Judging from the trend in the last few months, definitely, I think we see very strong demand both for business travel as well as for leisure travel. It's yet to be seen whether this is due to the pent-up demand or this is a business as usual kind of demand moving forward. I think it's a bit early to say. Within Cathay Pacific, we are focusing on rebuilding our network as soon as possible so that the ticket price level can return to more of a normal level.
For example, on our most popular long-haul route, London Heathrow, by summer season, starting end of this month into next month, we will be rebuilding back to pre-pandemic frequency already flying from Hong Kong to London Heathrow of around five daily frequencies already. We're rapidly rebuilding our capacity so that the supply and demand can be rebalanced, so that ticket price can go back to normal levels as soon as possible. Thank you.
Okay. Ronald, thank you. Okay. Well, I think that's all the time we have. Thank you to our speakers, and thank you for all your questions. This concludes our briefing for today. A copy of the presentation slides has been sent to you via email, and will also be available for download on our investor relations page website later on. If you have further questions, please email them to ir@cathaypacific.com. Thank you very much for joining us. Have a good day.