KUALA LUMPUR, April 6 — CGS-CIMB has raised its 2022 forecast of domestic traffic at airports managed by Malaysia Airports Holdings Bhd (MAHB) by 21 per cent to 85 per cent from 70 per cent of the pre-pandemic base in 2019, in light of the earlier-than-expected borders reopening.

The research house has also revised upward its 2022F international traffic forecasts to 40 per cent from 25 per cent of the pre-pandemic base.

“Our new forecasts are reasonable because in February 2022, Malaysia’s domestic traffic already reached 69 per cent of the 2019 base, and we expect a new airline, MYAirline, to commence operations from August,” analyst Raymond Yap said in a note today.

CGS-CIMB expects the country’s international borders to reopen by mid-2022F, but the government had decided to reopen from April 1 instead.

AirAsia and the Malaysia Aviation Group (MAG) reportedly said that they aimed to restore 90 per cent and 70 per cent of their pre-Covid passenger capacities by end-2022F, respectively.

As such, CGS-CIMB believes the capacities would be largely international in nature, given that both airlines companies concentrated on domestic capacity restoration in the past six months.

Yap said domestic and international traffic recovery might also come from Malindo Air and AirAsia X (AAX), both of which sharply curtailed their fleet during the pandemic.

“Malindo may transfer back to Malaysia some of the 24 Boeing 737s that were transferred to Indonesia in the past two years, while AAX may also restore some of its medium-haul passenger services if cargo yields can continue to pay for the costs of the flights given the high cargo yields currently,” he said.

As for the Istanbul Sabiha Gokcen International Airport (ISG), he said the international passenger traffic forecast for 2022F is now higher by 18 per cent to 100 per cent compared with 85 per cent of the pre-Covid base.

“We have already taken into account that Russia and Ukraine flights from ISG have been suspended; these contributed nine to 10 per cent of the ISG passenger traffic in 2019,” he said. — Bernama