Good afternoon. Welcome to the Cathay Group's 2023 Annual Results Analyst Briefing. My name is Andy Wong, the General Manager, Corporate Affairs for Cathay. Whether you're attending here in person or online, it is a pleasure to see you all, and thank you for joining us. Introducing our speakers for today: Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Ronald Lam. Chief Financial Officer, Ms. Rebecca Sharpe. We'll begin the presentations by Ronald and Rebecca, after which we'll open the floor to questions. In case you haven't scanned the QR code at the reception for an electronic copy of the presentation slides, a copy of the presentation and a video of today's briefing will be available to download on the Investor Relations page on our website later on today. So without further ado, let me invite Ronald to start the presentation. Ronald, please.
Good afternoon, everyone. Once again, welcome to today's briefing. I will cover the part about our group strategy, and then I will leave it to Rebecca to follow up on more details about the results and outlook. First of all, I would like to go back on the time horizon on what we have faced and what we are facing moving forward. So 2020 to 2022, as we all know, was the lowest value we had in our 70-something-year history due to the pandemic. And it was well known and well said by the industry that Cathay probably was the hardest-hit airline group in the world during COVID because no other airlines had their domestic borders closed as well as international borders closed. And we were also subject to very stringent crew quarantine measures that we have never seen elsewhere in the world.
We were under very, very harsh conditions during those three years. Then finally, early last year, the borders finally opened, and we quickly started to rebuild as well as to invest for our future. Now we are in the middle of this rebuild and invest journey. We are one year in, and as you can see, the first year we have got a set of very impressive results, and now we are into the second year of our rebuild and invest journey. Ultimately, our goal is to move Cathay to new heights again from 2025 onwards. 2025 is a major milestone for the aviation industry in Hong Kong because that is the first year our Three-Runway System at Hong Kong International Airport will be fully opened. We are well prepared for that. We look forward to that.
There will be more competition but also more opportunities for us. In terms of the rebuild and invest journey that we are currently in, I would like to give you a few highlights on where we are. The top agenda is, of course, rebuilding our flights. In particular, I think the public cares the most about our passenger flights. Now we have a dual brand strategy within our group. When it comes to passenger travel, we have Cathay Pacific representing the premium travel front and HK Express representing the low-cost travel front. This is a very powerful dual brand strategy that we have adopted since the pandemic. Therefore, we would look at our passenger flights rebuilt as a group because some of the previous Cathay Dragon flights are being flown by Cathay Pacific, and some of them are being flown by HK Express.
Therefore, it is better to compare the overall group in this regard. Back in December 2023, we were very successful in hitting our target of getting back to 70% of passenger flights. We set that at the beginning of that year, and then at the end of the year, we achieved this target. Then the next milestone we are looking at is quarter two this year, and we will hit 80% within Q2 this year. Now we are working towards rebuilding 100% of our passenger flights as a group within quarter one of 2025. Our rebuild journey is later than many other airlines and many other aviation hubs because, as we all know, Hong Kong opened up almost one year later compared to many other places. But we are no slower, although we were late.
Our rebuild pace, the fact that within two years we'll be back to 100%, actually is in line with all our global peers if you look at their rebuild journey. It's just that we started late, but we were no slower. Behind the flights rebuild, our workforce is the key driver. In order to rebuild to 100% of our flights, we have to rebuild 100% of our workforce as well. That's what we've been working hard on last year and also this year. But first of all, it is worth noting that since Hong Kong opened up, since we started our rebuild journey, the attrition level across all employee groups has become normal, including that for pilots. Last year's attrition for pilots, in particular, was absolutely normal. It was 5%, which is in line with what we have seen before the pandemic.
So on all fronts, we've been turning all taps on in recruiting as well as training our people. Back in 2023 last year, we managed to grow our group's workforce by around 3,000 positions, representing around 15% growth. And this year, we have even bigger plans that are well underway. Our target is to grow our overall workforce by another 5,000 or 20%. So by the end of this year, our total group workforce will be approaching 29,000 in total. And of course, today you've seen our success in rebuilding our financials as well, and I will leave it to Rebecca to explain in more details. But the top line figures are that we made HKD 9.8 billion consolidated profit. But I must put this into context. For the last three years during our low values, we made a loss of HKD 34 billion.
So it was against that background now that finally we've turned into profit again. And with the very positive results, we are able to reward our stakeholders, including our preference shareholders, i.e., the Hong Kong SAR Government. Up to date now, year to date, we have already paid them around HKD 2 billion worth of preference share dividend. And last year, we already repaid 50% of the preference shares, and by the end of July this year, our plan is still to repay the other half. And we have not forgotten about our ordinary shareholders, and today we are so pleased to announce that we'll be paying our ordinary shareholders a dividend of 0.43 HKD per share. Apart from rebuilding, we are also putting our eyes into the future.
So since we started our journey early last year, we've been working hard on making investment decisions to build up a strong future for ourselves moving forward as well as for the Hong Kong International Aviation Hub. And in the airline group, one key major investment is into our fleet. So I would like to share with you that actually, in the next four years, each year there will be a new fleet joining us. And many of these investment decisions have already been announced, but I think this is a nice picture to recap what we have done and what we'll be doing. So starting from 2025, we will have our 777-9 new aircraft arriving. 21 of them will be arriving into our fleet. They will become our flagship long-haul aircraft, flying to our key routes like London, New York, etc.
Then from 2026 onwards, we'll receive our second order for our narrow-body aircraft, i.e., A320neo and A321neo. Previously, we have already ordered 32 of them, and all of them are being delivered, and the delivery will finish by 2025. From 2026, we have ordered another 32 such aircraft to be used between Cathay Pacific and HK Express. You can refer back to our announcement last year. From 2027, late last year, we made an announcement, a very exciting announcement, that we have ordered 6 new-generation freighters, A350 freighters, which will arrive from 2027 with the option to acquire a further 20 as well. This is really important for the Hong Kong International Aviation Hub. As you know, Hong Kong has been the number one air cargo hub of the world for many, many years.
In fact, this week, we have the IATA World Cargo Symposium being held in Hong Kong, and I've been told that it is the most attended IATA event. I felt really excited when I had the chance to do an opening speech for that event yesterday. This is solid proof that we are committed to Hong Kong. We are committed to the air cargo hub status of Hong Kong for the future. All these are confirmed investments that we have already announced at different times during previous years. Currently, we are working on a new project. We are looking at what we so-called midsize widebody projects. We are looking at a number of new-generation midsize widebody aircraft to arrive into our fleet from 2028. As you can see, I think we have a solid plan to invest into our fleet.
In total, the firm orders we have on hand right now are more than 70 aircraft in the years to come, and we have another 52 options to buy more of the same aircraft if we want. Another major investment, apart from planes, is cabins. I'm also glad to share that in the next few years, each year, including this year, we will have a new cabin product launched to the market. Starting with this very exciting news that we unveiled on Monday about more details of our redesigned 777-300ER cabin with a new business class, what we call Aria Suite, as well as a new premium economy class and refreshed economy class. In a minute, I will show you a video in case you haven't seen this video yet.
What's more is from next year, when our new fleet of 777-9 arrives, we will have brand new first-class launch on that fleet together with business class, premium economy, and economy, of course. So it will be a very exciting milestone. We are very famous for our first-class product. It is our flagship product, and we are so glad that finally, next year, we will be able to launch our new world-class first-class product for our customers. Then from 2026, we'll roll out new products on our A330 fleet. I'm glad to share that all of the A330 in the future that we have will be equipped with lie-flat business class. We have already made that decision, and it will be rolled out from 2026. So a lot of exciting news for our premium travelers moving forward.
In the last few years, we have also taken the downtime to really reflect on our strategy moving forward. Each year, we've been refreshing our strategy and getting clearer and clearer. Here, I would like to give you a very quick overview on what our strategy on the page includes. There are four parts: purpose, vision, culture, and strategy. Our purpose is why we exist, and we are here to move people forward in life, whether it's our customers, our people, or the society in general. Our vision is a very high aspiration. We are aiming, as a group, to become one of the world's greatest service brands. Our aspiration is not just comparing ourselves with other airline peers. We want to be able to compare ourselves with any world's greatest service brands that you can think of and be part of them.
Culture is really important, and Cathay people are very famous for our strong culture, working together as one team during tough times and good times, as shown during the pandemic. So here, we have refreshed our culture underpinned by three values: being thoughtful, progressive, can do. Under each of the values, we have clearly defined our guiding principles in terms of how we would like our team to work together. Then last but not the least is our strategy, how we go about achieving our vision. There are three parts to it, which I would briefly go through with you in the next few slides. It is really important we start with Cathay's unique position. Being an airline group based in Hong Kong for the last 77 years, we, of course, have deep roots in Hong Kong. Hong Kong is our home.
But what's unique about us is not just about Hong Kong. It's that Hong Kong is sitting between our home country, China, and the world. So our role here is based in Hong Kong, deep roots in Hong Kong, and proudly part of China and connecting China with the world. This is a very powerful and unique positioning that you will not see in any other airline group. We feel we are very well positioned to play this unique role. So in the future, we'll be strengthening our position in Hong Kong, in the overall China, as well as our international standing. We'll continue to strengthen. And our organization, our people, reflect this unique position as well.
We are very famous for having a very diverse team within Cathay, a lot of Hong Kong people like myself, but we also have a lot of Chinese mainland background colleagues working with us and many international background people like Rebecca working in our team. Again, this is a really powerful combination, I believe, will bring us to a bright future together. Over the last few years, we organized our group into four main lines of business: premium travel, cargo, low-cost travel, as well as lifestyle. Under each of the four lines of business, we also have very, very high ambition. For Cathay Pacific, we want to be the world's best premium airline. We are already firmly in the world's top 10 premium airlines, but we won't stop there. Our ambition is to be the world's best.
Cathay Cargo, you can argue, is already the world's best air cargo carrier, and we would like to keep it that way. Last year, Cathay Cargo has been named Airline of the Year by Air Transport World, and we have also won many other awards as well. For HK Express, we want to aim to be Asia's best low-cost carrier. I will argue we are already among the top five, but again, we are not satisfied with that. We want HK Express to be Asia's best LCC. Similarly, for our premium travel lifestyle business, we want to aim to be the world's best, underpinned by our premium currency, Asia Miles. In order to achieve all these leadership positions, there are a few common themes across all four lines of business that we need to develop into a leadership position. First is safety and operational excellence.
It is really important we take a leadership position on this area moving forward. Digital and sustainability leadership is important. We have been doing a lot about digital and sustainability over the years, but what is different here is that we really want to be a leader in both areas when it comes to digital and sustainability, not just a player, but we want to be a leader as well. We have invested a lot in the last few years in these two areas. Okay. I think before that, I have a video to play. This is a video about our new 777-300ER that I mentioned, that the new cabins will be rolled out this year. Enjoy the video.
Thank you. Thank you, Ronald, and good afternoon, everyone. I know a number of you have asked me in the past to learn more about our strategy, so I hope you found that introduction from Ronald helpful. So I have to confess that sitting here to be able to talk to you about a full-year profit for the first time since I joined Cathay back in early 2021 makes me really excited. But we've got quite a number of slides in the deck that will follow. I won't touch on all of them. I'll try and dip into a few of the key highlights. But of course, we've got time for questions later so we can pick up on them or even subsequent to that if there are things you want further information on. So I'll probably stay pretty high-level, but yes, feel free to ask questions.
So on the first slide, we set out 6 of the key metrics for our 2023 full-year result. We've touched on the profit and some of the other aspects through the presentation. So maybe just if I touch on revenue here. So you can see that it's dramatically increased. The numbers in the grey box are the 2022 numbers. The numbers in green are the 2023 numbers, so an increase of about 85%. Now, that's a mix between the passenger story and the cargo story. So the passenger story, of course, is the pent-up demand, the reduction or the smaller amount of capacity. So we've got that supply-demand imbalance. But as we came out of the pandemic, the story very much for Cathay as a group, as it was for other airlines, was that high yields from the pent-up demand and the imbalance between supply and demand.
On the cargo side, though, however, that reduced. So within that HKD 94.5 billion, the cargo number has come down. You'll see the breakdown a bit later. But that has come down by about 18%. And that's the sort of cargo is ahead of passenger, if you like, in its normalization journey in as much as we're seeing all the metrics normalizing a bit earlier. And so their yields came down compared to the exceptional levels we saw in 2022 and 2021. At the bottom line, the group-attributable profit of HKD 9.8 billion, and then liquidity, gearing, and as Ronald mentioned earlier, the first dividend since October 2019 is very great to be able to share today. But as I say, we'll briefly touch on some of these later.
This next slide and in general, we're following similar slides that you've seen before in the hope that it helps you sort of compare and make it easy reference material for you all. This slide is around breaking down the different sort of ways of slicing our profit number, whether it be in the half-by-half perspective or at the different levels. So the first line there showing Cathay Pacific and our subsidiaries before any distortion from exceptional items, before any share of losses from associates. So at the Cathay and subs level, we made HKD 9.2 billion compared to the HKD 330 million loss last year. And then at the bottom line, the consolidated picture is shown there. In terms of the associates, you can see there we took within our numbers HKD 1.6 billion of a loss, significant reduction from the losses we included in 2022.
Just as a reminder, the biggest associates within our numbers are Air China and Air China Cargo. We're capturing their results three months in arrears. These numbers here go through to September 2023 rather than December. This chart here is to map the 2022 loss of HKD 6.6 billion and show you the key drivers of the change to the profit of HKD 9.8 billion for 2023. Here, you can see that story around the dramatic change in revenue on the passenger side, the slight reduction in the cargo revenue, and obviously the costs, whether it be fuel, whether it be operating costs, significant increases in those as well as they're supporting the capacity that we've increased during the course of the year in order to reach that 70% of pre-pandemic levels on the passenger side that Ronald mentioned earlier.
So those exceptional items, just as a reminder, these haven't changed much at all from the first half numbers that we shared with you, the biggest portion of that being the HKD 1.9 gain on deemed disposal. So a bit of an accounting treatment here. But when Air China issued shares early in 2023, we were diluted. And as a result, the accounting treatment means that you do do a calculation, and it deemed that we generated a gain on that disposal. The other thing here is a positive story is the reversal of impairments. So you remember through the pandemic years, we took sizable impairments on our aircraft. But we have brought some of those back into operation, and therefore, we've reversed some of the impairment charges. But those numbers are a distortion, you could argue, on our numbers for 2023.
Fuel. Everybody always asks me about fuel, of course, because it's such a big cost. And of course, it's gone up significantly because of the increase in capacity. It has been offset a little bit because overall for 2023 compared to 2022, fuel prices were lower but obviously not sufficient of an impact to offset the capacity growth. And the chart on the right there, another topic you always mention, is our fuel hedging profile. So this is as at 31st December 2023, by quarter for the next two years, how much we've got hedged. So you can see that for 2024, we've got roughly about 25% of our estimated fuel consumption hedged. And the red line on that chart shows you the price that it's hedged at. And we do continue to follow our fuel hedging policy. There's been no change to that and no plan change to that.
If I then turn to the cash story, of course, it won't surprise you to know that off the back of the strong profit result, our cash has also been strong. Here, what we're mapping on this chart is from the balance of liquidity at the end of last year, meaning 2022, through to the end of 2023. You can see overall, it's come down, and I'll explain a little bit about that. Just a reminder that when we're talking liquidity, I'm talking the cash that we have available to us in bank accounts, etc., but also the committed loan facilities that we have available to us. Overall, just to sort of comment on our liquidity, we carried high liquidity levels through the pandemic. We did that because of the level of uncertainty that we were facing at the time. Pre-pandemic, we kept lower levels.
That's the plan, to bring it back to the lower levels that you see here. You can see this significant amount of cash inflow we've generated from our operating activities in HKD 26.4 billion. And then what we've done with that money. So we've been able to invest. We've obviously spent money on capital equipment, aircraft, etc. But the big part of what we've done in 2023 is being able to repay loan and lease payments. And of course, the big story was being able to afford to repay half of the preference shares the government invested in us back in 2020. So you can see there the sort of profile of what the cash we've generated and then how we've spent it. So in terms of because we've redeemed, bought back half the preference shares, it's had quite an impact on our equity.
So we've included this slide here just to give you a snapshot of the equity at the end of 2022 and its breakdown and the equity at the end of 2023 and its breakdown. So you may remember that in November of last year, we announced a capital reduction. And what we did there was the HKD 19.5 billion that we had in the preference share capital account was converted to a preference share reserve account, which we can then repay the preference shares from. So you can see that happening between the two charts there, moving from a preference share capital account to a preference share reserve. And you can see the number going down significantly, albeit rounded to a decimal point, as we repaid the 50%.
Now, overall, although equity has gone down somewhat, it hasn't gone down, of course, by the amount of the preference share repayment because the profits have offset that to a large extent. So just as it's a slightly unusual year, we've included this here for your easy reference. And then touching on liquidity, the charts here, I've got liquidity balances on the left and the debt levels on the right coupled with our debt-to-equity ratio. And you can see it is a coincidence. It wasn't planned that our 2019 liquidity balance was exactly 20 and the one at the end of 2023 was exactly 20. And you can see the high levels that we had through 2020, 2021, and 2022 and the split there between the dark green being the cash on hand, the lighter green being the undrawn facilities. And as I say, that is the plan.
So we're back now at more normal levels with the uncertainties that we saw the past few years disappeared. So we intend to keep it at lower levels, especially in the current interest rate environment. And on the right, you can see that we've also, as I mentioned, repaid some of our debt. We did actually repay some debt a bit early as well in order to help manage our interest costs with the high interest rates that we saw in 2023. And as you see, that comes down and brings the gearing ratio down with it. So just touching briefly on those financing charges, you can see that the total a little bit lower in 2023, the green bar on the right, compared to 2022, even though interest rates last year were, of course, much higher than they had been.
But through the liquidity management process that we adopted, we've managed to keep those costs as low as we could. And on the right, I often get asked about our fixed versus floating rate split for the funding that we have in place. So they're at 43% versus 57%. So I'm conscious of time. So I'll just dip into the business performance highlights briefly to give you a bit of color on some of the lines of business that Ronald alluded to earlier. On this slide, this is the passenger-related, the customer travel, premium travel. You can see that passenger revenue number on the top line that I mentioned, the significant increase there. You can also see the significant increase in passengers carried, almost 18 million compared to just the 2.8 million in the previous year. So big step changes in all the premium travel-related metrics.
This one, setting out capacity, load factor, and yield by each half year over the past five years. Again, you can see the dramatic change in the capacity to get to our 70% by the end of last year and then the high load factors that we saw through the course of the year, albeit second half slightly lower than the first half as capacity increased and yield levels remaining higher than pre-pandemic levels as we managed through the pent-up travel demand. For cargo, again, the revenue number on the top line, you can see the 18% reduction that I mentioned. And that's despite the cargo carried. You can see partway down that chart increasing by almost 20%. And again, that says the supply and demand becomes more imbalanced. We are seeing benefit from e-commerce.
And although the cargo yields are going down, as I think you'll see on the next slide with the bottom chart, they're still higher than they were pre-pandemic, sort of around the early 2020 mark for late last year. Again, load factors getting back to pretty normal levels and capacity continuing to increase as we add the passenger aircraft into the fleet. I'll flip to HK Express because I just want to highlight here again their revenue numbers multiple times what we saw in 2022. And they were profitable also in 2023 to the tune of HKD 433 million, somewhat similar to the Cathay premium travel line of business. All the metrics are dramatically higher with the exception of yield that starts to come down. So a good story for HK Express as well. Their capacity was able to ramp up more quickly given the nature of their business.
To touch briefly on costs, again, people have asked me about this in the past. We always talked about the fact that as capacity comes back on, our per-unit cost will come down, of course. You can see against if you look at the percentages here, you can see the ones that are driven far more by being variable in nature. So obviously, you've got some of our costs that are fixed and therefore won't change much despite the increase in capacity. You've got others that are sort of half-half. You've got others that are very variable, like the in-flight service and passenger expenses, for instance, a big step change in that as the capacity ramps up dramatically, whereas depreciation stays pretty much flat. So a good story heading in the right direction here at $2.47 for the year in terms of the costs per unit without fuel.
Sustainability, just to call out here, I won't talk about it, but our sustainability report will be published on the same day as our annual report. All the information about our key areas of focus, the statistics, etc., are all in this report. So I encourage you to take a look. I know you often have lots of sustainability ESG-related questions. So there is a lot of information in this report. Moving on to Outlook very briefly. I'm sure we'll get some more questions about this. So just a reminder, again, the notes on these three slides are more for your reference than me to talk to in detail. But I guess to call out a couple of things, the ordinary share dividends that we announced today will be paid on the 2nd of May. As I say, that's the first dividend we've been able to pay since 2019.
We do still plan to pay back the remaining 50% of the preference shares by the end of July, of course, always subject to market conditions. As I touched on earlier, we do anticipate maintaining the lower but what we believe is healthy level of liquidity going forward, similar to the levels we kept in pre-pandemic times. In terms of travel, I don't think it will surprise you. I think we've said this before, and others in the industry are saying it. The entire aviation ecosystem, both here in Hong Kong and globally, does continue to face constraints both in terms of resources and supply chains, parts from manufacturers, etc., etc. So that backdrop still exists and will continue for some time. We will reach 80% of our pre-pandemic passenger flight levels within Q2 of this year.
Then we'll be working towards reaching 100% in the first quarter of next year. We do anticipate that yields will continue to normalize throughout 2024 for our passenger business. We've started to see that in the early part of this year. Moving to cargo, the bright spot in cargo is definitely the continued strong demand from e-commerce, both here in Hong Kong and the wider Greater Bay Area. We're expecting capacity will increase, of course, as we increase the passenger capacity. Obviously, the belly space on those planes gives us more cargo capacity. So that imbalance between supply and demand will continue to sort of right itself. Again, in this sector, we're also expecting the yields to continue to reduce from the 2023 levels as the overall industry normalizes. Maybe just a couple of closing remarks from me.
This slide just for your reference to capture the key points. But I would like to summarize that 2023 was very much a sort of unique year, for want of a better description. It was our first profitable year since 2019, obviously based on the surge in demand following the restrictions being lifted. And that strong financial result has enabled us to start sort of repaying, rewarding the different stakeholders that supported us through the pandemic, obviously off the back of $34 billion of losses through those years and the support we got from the government, from our shareholders, from customers, from our employees. And so the dividend we've been able to announce to our ordinary shareholders, we've been able to recognize and reward our people.
We've been able to make commitments to investments in our fleet and product as Ronald took us through and to begin to repay the government in the form of both getting up to date on the preference share dividends that you remember we deferred through the pandemic and also repaying the preference shares in terms of 50% of it. So going forward, we have a clear strategy to continue to rebuild and to invest as we work towards our goal of moving Cathay to greater heights and our aspiration of achieving our vision to become one of the world's greatest service brands. And I'll stop there. And I think we can open for questions. Thank you.