Thank you very much. This is Perry from UBS. Congratulations for the first strong result for three years in a row. I got two questions. First related to your passenger capacity. You've been saying, we are going to grow 10% this year. In terms of the fleet, we are probably growing at 4% in terms of your passenger aircraft. I'm curious in terms of the growth, what would drive that 10% capacity growth? That's my first question. The second question is related to the situation in Middle East. Obviously it drives up the fuel price significantly, and spread has widened very significantly too.
What sort of approach Cathay would take in this situation where spread has widened to an extent that we didn't really see over the last one to two decades? Would fare ticket price adjustment be something on the table to address the higher fuel costs? That's all for now. Thanks.
Thank you, Perry. I'm happy to take the first question regarding our passenger capacity, 10% year-on-year projected for 2026. First, we are still taking delivery of eight narrow-body aircraft this year, so that would give us more capacity. Second is that throughout 2025, month-on-month, actually, we've been growing until we hit the peak in December. When we keep 2026 even flat, I think there's still year-on-year growth, particularly on the earlier month of the year. I think that would generate a 10%. The second question regarding the spike in fuel price, yes, as Rebecca mentioned, comparing the March jet fuel price to the last two months, it has almost doubled.
I think it's a sharp surge, and we hope that this peaceful resolution of the current conflict will mean that things will be more back to normal sooner rather than later. In the meantime, I think we would rely on our mitigation measures. As Rebecca mentioned, I think 30% of our fuel is hedged for 2026, although we're only hedging the crude oil part, not the crack part. Secondly, we have a fuel surcharge mechanism both on the travel side as well as on the cargo side. The fuel surcharge takes into account jet fuel price. Since jet fuel has almost doubled, I think we'll be making an announcement about increasing fuel surcharges for both travel and cargo in due course. That's another mitigation.
In terms of our freightage and fares, we will have to look at the supply and demand, which is also pretty volatile, right? There's quite drastic changes in terms of demand patterns due to the Middle East situation as well as supply situation is also different. Currently it's still dynamic. It's changing all the time. I think we'll just charge according to supply and demand in the market and see what competition will be doing. I think we'll always look out for those kind of opportunity.
Okay. Thank you, Ronald. Okay. Maybe perhaps we can turn to a couple of questions online. We have a question from HSBC, it's about capacity. The question goes, how are the capacity from the canceled Middle East flights being deployed? Are they idling or are they flying?
Well, first of all, we have been flying to two destinations only in the Middle East, Dubai and Riyadh. Each of those destinations, we had a daily frequency. We're talking about two flights per day to the Middle East. It's not a huge number of flights that we are operating. Currently, we've decided to suspend those flights until end of this month, 31st of March. We are trying to deploy the capacity in the meantime to other popular routes. For example, we would be adding a few more flights to London, and we'll be upgrading the aircraft currently we fly into Zurich to create a bit more capacity for our European customers.
Okay. Thank you. Perhaps we'll take one more question from online to give some time to the physical audience to see whether they have a question. The next question is about another line of business, so it's on HK Express. It's a few part questions, so we can maybe address them one by one. I think the first question is, do you expect any delays for the delivery of your new fleets? I think that's general across Cathay Pacific and UO. For UO, how do we differentiate ourselves from other LCC such as Scoot or AirAsia? Thank you.
Well, in terms of fleet delivery for HK Express, we still have a number of orders. Remember we ordered 32 narrow-body aircraft between Cathay Pacific and HK Express, and they are going to start to arrive later this year. For example, this year, HK Express will be taking delivery of five such aircraft and then more to come in 2027, 2028 onward. So far, I think, there's no major delay on these delivery. I think pretty much on time, I would say, by and large, with some small adjustments. We don't expect any major issues when it comes to narrow-body fleet delivery. What was the second question? Sorry. Please.
The differentiation strategy.
Differentiation strategy. We work really hard on our fundamentals. We are very proud about our on-time performance, for example. Last year's on-time performance of HK Express was 88%, a very high on-time performance, highly reliable. We are also very proud of our brand. It's a very popular brand in Hong Kong and also in the Greater Bay Area. We are getting a much more popular presence among airlines in the Greater Bay Area. In fact, we are the biggest airline based among all the Greater Bay Area-based airlines. We are the biggest in terms of cross-border flying to the rest of Asia. In Hong Kong, we are also the second biggest airline based in Hong Kong after Cathay Pacific.
Differentiation with other LCC. I think LCC have a number of best practices that we are learning from each other. We respect those brands that has been mentioned by well by HSBC colleague. I think we continue to learn from other LCC, and other LCC, I'm sure, is learning from us as well. I think we'll just keep that going. I believe the key advantage we have is that we not only have the Hong Kong market, but we have a very big Greater Bay Area market. In fact, around 1/3 of our revenue for HK Express is already coming from the mainland cities of the Greater Bay Area. That is the second largest point of sale after Hong Kong already, and it's keep growing all the time.
I think that's one unique advantage I would say we have. Yeah. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you. We have a couple of questions on the passenger side of the business, so maybe we can address it in one go. The question is, well, since the Middle East tension broke out, has passenger yield stopped declining or is it normalizing? Also, what's the demand for Cathay Pacific looking like? Any variation by region? Thank you.
Well, I think it's still early days. In the meantime, many of the Middle Eastern carrier has drastically reduced their operation. Therefore, we have seen some short-term surge in demand on our flights. Like our flights between Hong Kong and Europe in particular has seen a surge in demand. Our long-haul flights in the short runs are already very full, pretty full, even before the conflict. Our room to take on new booking actually is limited, I would say. Second question was?
Well, by region. Were there any variation by region? What's the Cathay Pacific businesses looking like?
Well, again, short term, I mentioned, European flight demand has seen a surge definitely. Other long-haul flights, right, has also seen some uptick in the short run. For example, I think Indian market relies quite a lot to go through Middle East to go to the U.S. But now they can't, and some of that demand has been channeled to go via Hong Kong to the U.S., for example. Our U.S. flight, for example, has also seen a surge in demand. Australian flights, because some of them go through Middle East to go to Europe, and now they go through Hong Kong, more of them go through Hong Kong than before, and therefore, our Australian flights are also in high demand.
Basically, all the long-haul flights have seen a short-term uptick in demand. It's short-term. I mean, it's changing by the day. I think we being agile.
Okay. Thank you, Ronald. I think we'll take one more question from online, which is actually a mirror question for from the last one, but on cargo. The question was, Can you talk about a little bit more about your cargo business? Do you see yield normalizing, cargo yield normalizing? And is there any tailwind from the because as a result of the Middle East disruption? Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you. Well, cargo yield has been normalizing over the past few years, and we believe that trend will continue. Cargo market is very dynamic, right? The supply and demand is changing even faster than on the travel side. I think it's really hard to say. We would go where our customer want us to go, and we will try to compete and capture demand effectively. As you can see, I think the yield normalization has slowed down already last year on year. In terms of the short-term impact of the Middle Eastern situation to cargo, we haven't seen a major uptake because our flights from Hong Kong are pretty full already. We haven't seen a drastic change.
The more immediate impact is that we have a number of freighter flights that go to Europe with a stopover in Dubai for tech stop and carry uplifting more cargo. Because of the situation in Dubai, we're now skipping that stopover, and we are flying direct from Hong Kong to Europe with some payload restriction because we couldn't uplift fuel in between. That's the small impact from a supply angle.
Okay. Thank you, Ronald Lam. Any questions from the room? Well, if not, then, well, thank you to our speaker, and thank you for joining us today. That's all the time we have. This concludes the briefing for today, and if you have any further questions, please email them to ir@cathaypacific.com. Thank you and have a good day.