China Airlines Ltd (CAL, 中華航空) said it expects peak season effects in the fourth quarter to continue to boost demand for passenger flights and cargo services, after reporting its second-highest-ever September sales on Monday.
The carrier said it posted NT$15.88 billion (US$517 million) in consolidated sales last month, trailing only September last year’s NT$16.01 billion.
Last month, CAL generated NT$8.77 billion from its passenger flights and NT$5.37 billion from cargo services, it said.
Photo: Wu Liang-yi, Taipei Times
In the first nine months of this year, the carrier posted NT$154.93 billion in cumulative sales, up 2.62 percent from a year earlier, marking the second-highest level for the January-September period.
CAL said cargo service prices continued to rise last month and are expected to keep rising in the fourth quarter as the year-end shopping season approaches.
In addition, global demand for artificial intelligence servers, chips and semiconductor equipment is expected to stay strong this quarter to further push up sales from its cargo services, it said.
In terms of passenger flights, CAL said it will raise the number of weekly flights between Taipei and Tokyo’s Narita Airport to four starting from Oct. 26 to boost ticket sales, while the autumn foliage season in Japan and South Korea is expected to bring the load factor — an industry metric that measures percentage of passenger capacity used — of flights to Tokyo and Seoul to around 90 percent this month.
CAL added the factor of flights to destinations in Australia are expected to top 90 percent this month as demand remains high and stable.
Last week, EVA Airways Corp (長榮航空) said it posted NT$15.62 billion in sales for last month, down 10 percent from a year earlier.
The carrier said the decline came as Ghost Month, which was from Aug. 23 to Sept. 21 this year, affected consumer appetite to take overseas trips, while demand also fell after the summer vacation ended.
Last month, sales posted by its passenger flights totaled NT$9.32 billion and revenue generated by cargo services hit NT$4.33 billion, it said.
In the first nine months of the year, cumulative sales fell 1.07 percent from a year earlier to NT $162.69 billion, it added.
EVA Airways said it remains upbeat about this month as the month has three national holidays that are likely to boost travel demand. In addition, the carrier will launch flights to Busan, South Korea, later this month and the new route is expected to generate more sales in the month as well as the fourth quarter.
The carrier said the fourth quarter is peak season for cargo services so sales are also likely to move higher.
Meanwhile, Starlux Airlines Co (星宇航空) posted NT$2.95 billion in sales last month, up 5 percent from a year earlier after revenue from cargo services rose 26 percent from a year earlier to NT$444 million.
Starlux Airlines said it will introduce a new winter flight schedule at the end of this month by providing more flights in the region, resuming flights to Manila on Dec. 16 and launching flights to Phoenix, Arizona, on Jan. 15 next year, further boosting sales.
During the January-September period, Starlux Airlines posted NT$32.7 billion in cumulative sales, up 26 percent from a year earlier.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
RSS