Cathay Pacific Airways Limited (0293.HK) Retrns to Profit
Hong Kong carrier Cathay Pacific on Wednesday swung to a healthy profit in the first half of the year thanks to a pick-up in travel, with the airline expecting passenger capacity to reach 70 percent of pre-pandemic levels by end of the year.
The airline said it made a $546 million profit in January-June, compared with a loss of $640 million in the same period last year.
It also suffered big losses in the first six months of 2020 and 2021 as the city was battered by coronavirus travel restrictions.
Chairman Patrick Healy said Wednesday that Cathay had "worked to rebuild connectivity at the Hong Kong international aviation hub following the full reopening of borders in Hong Kong and in" mainland China.
The airline has been making "good progress" in adding flights and destinations between January and June, which was a "positive period", Healy added in the exchange filing.
"While we are still only part way along our rebuilding journey, our results for the first six months of 2023 demonstrate that we are on the right track," he said.
He added that Cathay would hit its target of "70 percent pre-pandemic passenger flight capacity levels... by the end of 2023".
"We are confident of reaching 100 percent by the end of 2024."
Cathay carried a total of 7.8 million passengers in the first half of the year, bringing in $3.2 billion.
Total revenue -- including cargo and other services -- more than doubled year-on-year to $5.6 billion.
But a weaker overseas demand meant that the cargo unit's revenues dropped 11.6 percent to $1.4 billion.
Hong Kong last year belatedly abandoned the "zero-Covid" policy, which imposed strict rules on travellers and kept the city internationally isolated for two and a half years -- tanking the finance hub's economy.
The airline has struggled to catch up to regional rivals such as Singapore Airlines, and is racing to rebuild its capacity amid a manpower crunch.
The group said on Wednesday it had been "operating cash generative so far in 2023" and plans to buy back 50 percent of preference shares before year-end at a redemption price of more than $1.25 billion.
AI is the Neat Handwriting of the Illiterate
A model in the hands of someone who has read the filing and walked the plant is a clerk. The same model, speaking for someone who has done neither, is a disguise. On AI slop, phantom citations and factslop, why finish stopped being evidence of work, and the containment layer KXCO built so a machine cannot speak as the institution until a source is attached.
Worthship: Do Not Conform to the Age
Worthship is the older English word for worship, and it means to ascribe worth. Bishop Robert Barron preached Romans 12 on 30 August. This essay follows the text into the prison letters, and puts two questions to a graph: do the four readings of that Sunday agree, and was Paul free or in chains when he wrote about despair?
The Truth in All Its Ugliness Must Survive
A majority vote does not determine the truth. Consensus is a mood, gossip is a sport, and a model will write the pretty version for free. Why the ugly number has to survive, why a record beats a dashboard, and what KXCO was built to keep standing when the room changes its mind.
Don't Be the Best, Be the Only: Winning in an AI World
AI is repricing competence downward. What it cannot reproduce is a life. The case for remaining non-fungible, why friction still produces the best ideas, and what it means to build AI systems that keep the human intellect in them.
Every story, signed and delivered.
Subscribe to the kxco channel and get the headline, the AI-written key takeaways, and the chain-anchor link the moment we publish. Audio versions and per-ticker subscriptions arrive in the next iteration.