We'll now open the floor to questions. If you would like to ask a question, please kindly raise your hand and I'll call on you, and one of our colleagues will hand you a microphone. Please state your name and the organization before asking your question. So, the gentleman on our left.
Hi, good afternoon. This is Deepak Maurya from HSBC. The first question, obviously, is about the capacity ramp-up. We are at 70% in December, 80% in second quarter, but why is it taking so long, next three quarters, just to get to a 100%? So what are the drivers behind this delay? Is it equipment, people, or is it anything else?
Well, first of all, I disagree that it's slow. If you look at our peers that started earlier than us, it took them roughly the same time to go back to 100%. So I think we are building as fast as other airlines have done, who started before us. So, I think the critical part is workforce, as I mentioned, pilots, cabin crew, ground employees. And in particular, as I mentioned, this year, we are targeting to grow our overall group workforce by 5,000 positions, roughly 20%. So that is a huge task to achieve. I must say, so far, we are on track. We're now two and a half months into this year.
I think the recruitment machine and the training machines are working well, but it's gonna take time, because such large number of people to get recruited and trained on all fronts will take some time. So, we don't think Q1 next year is slow. It is not slow when compared to many other airlines. It's just that Hong Kong started late, so I think it's the timeframe that it will take to build back to 100% of our passenger flights.
Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you. The second row, the gentleman on the second row.
Hi, Andrew Lee from Jefferies. Great results, great dividend, and nice share price reaction this afternoon, right? So it's all good. A few questions from me. The first is, you mentioned that cargo yields and passenger yields will normalize. How do you define normalize? Is it 2019 levels? Similar on the passenger side, you mentioned that you're seeing some a little bit of the yields are beginning to fall on a month-to-month basis, right? Could you give us a little bit of color in terms of how quickly that is falling? Right? And added to that, you have the two brands, right? The Cathay CX and the Hong Kong Express. Are you seeing any consumer behavior changing, right, in terms of which one is seeing more yield erosion or yield under pressure, right?
And so I'm trying to get a sense to, is there any difference between the behavior of the two brands?
Sure. Let me take the question. When we say normalize, it's relative to the heights during the pandemic. During the pandemic, all the travel behavior, the supply and demand were upside down, basically, so. And when we say normalize, it's relative to that and relative to last year. So certainly, we have seen that airfares has been coming down compared to last year. In many of our routes, so far, these two months, has come down by more than 10% compared to last year already, so. But this is expected as we add more flights, as our peers add more flights worldwide, this normalization would happen.
Where it will land is still subject to supply and demand at the end, so I think we're not gonna make any prediction where it will land, but the trend is certainly normalizing. Another factor I think we need to take note is that, for the overall aviation industry worldwide, after the pandemic, there's a supply chain issue. There's a shortage of manpower, shortage of supplies, in the overall aviation market, and therefore, there's been inflationary pressure overall facing all the airlines worldwide. So I think that is another factor that will determine how quickly things will normalize, and where we will land in terms of the airfares and all that. So, but the trend, certainly, I think the airfares have been coming down, it will further come down.
And between HK Express and Cathay Pacific, we are seeing the same trend of normalization. Well, it's really difficult to compare, because HK Express, they fly only short-haul routes within the Asia region, and they only have one cabin, i.e., economy class, whereas Cathay Pacific, we have business class, premium economy, et cetera. So the yield mix in Cathay Pacific is much more complex. And also, we have in and out Hong Kong, we have transit traffic, so it's really hard to compare. But as a direction of travel, yes, I think we are seeing both airlines' yield normalizing. In terms of whether we have seen any travel behavior change, I don't see any significant trend that was different from before the pandemic.
We still have many business travelers, we have leisure travelers, we have people visiting friends and families. So I don't see a really structural change that we can see so far, I would say. Have I answered all your questions?
Yeah. Okay. Yeah, thank you.
The lady on our right.
Thank you. Thank you, this is Qianlei Fan from Morgan Stanley. I have a few questions. First, congratulations on the very robust results. Very happy to see the reception of cash dividends. So the first question is about, dividend payout policy. Can you please remind us your dividend payout policy that we can, make forecast for the future years? The second question is about unit cost. So, very encouraging to see the 28% down on a year-on-year basis in terms of unit, cost. So, is there any guidance on unit cost ex-fuel, for the next, year and 2024 , 2025 ? And the third question is about cargo. So, you mentioned cargo yield will drop on a year-on-year basis.
This is a little bit different from what we heard from a few of China mainland-based airlines. Actually, they are seeing an increase in cargo yield in 2024 compared with 2023, although there is a very strong resumption of capacity on the international front. So, the question is: What could make you turn more bullish on cargo? And also, may I ask, what's the percentage of contract coverage on your cargo capacity in 2024 and going forward? Thanks.
Okay. Shall I start with the dividend policy? So historically, our dividend policy has always been to pay approximately 50% of our distributable profits. Obviously, subject to market conditions, investments, our balance sheet at that point in time. So that's effectively today's dividend that we've announced is approximately 30% of our distributable profit. So obviously, while that's our overriding policy, we will vary from that, subject to the conditions at the time. So no reason to say that we'll be changing that as a general policy going forward. Excuse me. In terms of unit cost, I think they should continue to come down.
In terms of sort of trying to give you some guidance, I guess the best thing to look at is those percentages I was showing on the unit cost slide that we've got in the deck. You can see from there which of the costs are more fixed and which are more variable, and therefore, as we continue to increase capacity, those that are more variable will be the ones that will be impacted, and therefore help to bring the overall unit cost further down. And then on the cargo yield, probably, Ronald can give a little bit more color. I think we are seeing the strength from the e-commerce industry more recently, that is keeping yields at a reasonable level.
How that will play out, again, as Ronald sort of mentioned earlier, in terms of journey to normalization, it's very hard to judge based on the sort of global economy at the moment, to be honest. I don't know whether you wanted to elaborate anything.
As to the question about how much of our cargo capacity has been contracted out, I'm afraid this is commercially sensitive, so I am not able to reveal that. So I'm sorry about that. Thank you.
Gentleman in the back, on our right. Yeah.
Excuse me. Hi, Ronald. Hi, Rebecca. It's Tim Bacchus from Bloomberg Intelligence. So just a couple of questions. One is, continuing on that capacity note. So I noticed the fixation or the focus on flights in terms of the recovery. When I look at, you know, the schedules in Cirium that you filed, which tend to be quite accurate in terms of what you actually then do fly, it's lower on an ASK basis, right? And so, and oftentimes in the investment community, we're looking at ASK. So I see maybe second quarter we're, like, 70% of 2019, rather than, you know, 80% on the flight side. I guess my question here is, it looks like you're flying much shorter stage lengths. I mean, much fewer long-haul flights.
So how long do you sort of expect that sort of situation to continue? Is there a time when long haul will catch up and you'll see that average stage length return, ASKs will pick back up? And the second question is on the labor cost side. So we've seen the volume side, the up 20% that you're predicting for this year. I guess the question is, how about on the pricing side, the salary side? So I presume we're gonna see that, that bonus from last year's good results come in in the first half, but then average sort of salary-type increases that we could see. And also on the labor, if you could break down where, sort of, cabin crew, pilots, and others, the 5,000 would come from. Thanks.
Okay. Yes, it is correct that we, when we talk about 80%, 100%, we talk about flights, passenger flights. I think it's fair to say that, when we say pre-pandemic comparison, we were really talking about 2019 already, and today is already 2024.
Mm-hmm.
So it was really five years ago, and it was a very outdated market, I would say. So the world has changed a lot, and we are not necessarily flying back to where we used to fly five years ago. So our route planning, network planning, is based on the latest, well, situation, depending on where the customer demand is, then we would build our network accordingly. So it is really hard to just compare, therefore, right? That's the same route structure, and therefore, we believe that by looking at the number of flights is more relevant, because the route structure has changed. That's one factor. The other factor is that before pandemic, we had three airlines, right? We have Cathay Pacific, we have Cathay Dragon, and HK Express.
But after the pandemic, we are now under this dual brand strategy, so Cathay Pacific only and HK Express. So our strategy has changed also, by a great deal. And HK Express, it was a airline that we acquired in the middle of 2019, and we have been growing it. In fact, in terms of its number of flights, it's already by end of last year, it was already 130% when compared to pre-pandemic. So the market is really changing, I would say, and therefore, we, we're less hung up on chasing the pre-pandemic ASK, which reflected the route structure that we had at that time. And therefore, we'll be more looking at the frequency moving forward. In terms of. You spoke about labor cost.
I think it is worth mentioning that during the pandemic, we have done a lot of transformation in our organization, including the cessation of Cathay Dragon being one of them, and then turning into this dual brand strategy. The other thing, major transformation we've done is with regard to our pilots and cabin crew. We've transformed the way our crew work, and in general, I would say now our crew are able to work in a more efficient and productive way than before. So when we look at labor costs, it's not just the salary or other remuneration. We should look at productivity. And I would say, overall, I think we are in a much more competitive position versus our industry peer coming out from the pandemic.
So end of last year, we announced a salary increment of 3.8%, which is more or less in line with the market. And today, I think you'll find out from the news anyway, that we've announced a profit share for our people up to 7.2 weeks. And last September, we pay our people special recognition reward for people who have supported us throughout the pandemic. We pay our people up to six weeks. And then in January, this year, we have paid a discretionary bonus of one month. So in the span of around eight months, we have actually rewarded our people up to 17 weeks worth of additional pay. Some of these are one-off, right?
Like the six weeks last year is to reward people who stuck around with us. But hopefully, in future, when we continue to create more success financially as a company, we can share back more success with our people through the form of discretionary variable pay, while keeping our ongoing labor costs competitive when compared to our peers.
Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you, Ronald. Perhaps, in the interest of time, we can address some of the questions from our online audience. So we have a question from Grand Alliance Asset Management: "So the flight service to the Chinese mainland seems to underperform, and the load factor is the lowest amongst the groups. So may I have your idea about the outlook of this market? Will the weak economy in the Chinese mainland affect the capacity resumption plan?
Well, as of end of 2023, we, as a group, we fly to 17 airports and 16 cities in Chinese mainland already. So it's a very wide coverage, and we have been rebuilding as quickly as we could. We're very confident about our Chinese mainland's flight performance, and we are seeing good results, and a lot of them coming between Hong Kong and Chinese mainland, and many of them using Hong Kong as a transit hub to go to Asia, to the U.S., Canada, to Europe, by and large. So this is a very important traffic stream for us, and we are very confident. And in fact, yesterday, our low-cost subsidiary, HK Express, they launched another new point in Chinese mainland, i.e., Beijing Daxing Airport.
They are added flights, so we're all very excited about that. And recently, we welcome the news of adding two points to the Individual Visit Scheme. Adding two points, Xi'an and Qingdao, and after that, we've also announced that we're adding more flights or capacity to those two points by end of March. So just a reflection of our commitment to further strengthening our Chinese mainland route as a group. Yeah. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you, Ronald. So maybe a couple of more questions from online. We can take them together. So the question was: "What's the expected CapEx plan for the next few years? And, you know, what's the reason for a lower fuel hedging gain for full year 2023?" So I think maybe Rebecca?
Yep.
Thank you.
I can take those. So in terms of the CapEx over the next few years, you'll see in the announcement, that we have, I think, as at 31st December, 75 aircraft on order. 21 of those are the wide-body, 777-9 that Ronald talked about in his part of the presentation. So the majority or there's a mix in, in fact, between the number of narrow bodies and wide bodies. So I think that can give you an indication in terms of capital expenditure in the coming years, because of course, the fleet is by far the biggest amount of investment. But we will be investing in product again, as Ronald shared in his description.
The other comment on the fuel hedging, of course, the amount of the gain is dependent on the price that we fix the fuel at, and then what the fuel price does. So the number that we end up being much smaller is purely as a result of the fact that the fuel price was at the level it was, a bit lower, versus the price that we fixed those hedges at. So it's nothing more scientific than that in terms of the impact as a result of the market and when we take out the hedges. And you'll remember that we hedge up to two years out, but more in the earlier part of that two-year period, in line with the schedule that you saw on the slide.
Okay. Thank you. I think, w ell, that's all the time we have, so thank you to all our speakers, and thank you for all your questions. So this concludes the briefing for today. If you have any further questions, please email them to ir@cathaypacific.com. Thank you very much for joining us. Have a good day.
Thank you.
Thank you.