Cathay volume stays buoyant after holiday rush

Hong Kong airline sees volume and load factor stay high in January, with a bump in February expected for Chinese New Year.    Cathay Pacific Airways said its cargo volume carried in January increased 12.5 percent year-over-year to 147,275 tons.
   Cathay and sister airline Dragonair saw their joint cargo load factor rise 2.9 percent in the month, to 63.4 percent. Capacity rose 8.9 percent, while revenue-ton-kilometers (a key metric for air freight carriers) rose 14.1 percent.
   “Demand fell away, as expected, after the very busy end to 2014, but the markets remained relatively buoyant, particularly on the North American lanes,” said Mark Sutch, Cathay Pacific’s general manager of cargo sales and marketing, in a statement. “Traffic out of the key Hong Kong and Mainland China markets was much stronger than in the same month last year. We saw a pick-up in demand as January progressed and by the end of the month we were operating close to a full freighter schedule.
   “We expect to see something of a mini-rush before the Chinese New Year holidays begin,” he added.