Acting Group CEO Speaks
A leading corporate leader with strong financial background and extensive experience in various fields , he is currently steering Malaysia Airports to greater heights.
This month, Raja Azmi Raja Nazuddin recaps some of the recent achievements made by the airport operator as it moves into 2019 such as its improved third quarter results and continued higher passengers’ growth.
As we greet another New Year, I cannot but help recount some of our more recent accomplishments. They include the incorporation of Malaysia Airports (Subang) Sdn Bhd, which is expected to further spur the growth of our aerospace industry into a regional hub. This wholly-owned subsidiary will look into our immediate plans within the next five to 10 years related to Subang Airport’s regeneration.
Subang Airport currently serves three million passengers per annum (mppa). Over the past decade, it has developed a matured aerospace ecosystem that attracted the presence of top global players and created over 3,000 job opportunities. We plan to increase the capacity to five mppa and equip its industrial aviation park with state-of-the-art smart facilities that champion Industry 4.0. In our plans lined up to 2025, we have clearly defined the spatial and operational demarcation for its city airport, business aviation hub and aerospace clusters.
Bracing ourselves for 2019, we recognise the global macro economic pressures arising from trade restrictions between China and the United States and tightening global financing conditions. Nevertheless, we are confident of improved financial performance for 2018. Our recently released third quarter results ended 30 September 2018 showed Malaysia Airports’ net profit surging 108% to RM168.49 million, thanks to higher international passenger traffic for Malaysia and growth momentum at our airport operations in Turkey.
We are happy to note our latest data for November showed continued growth with 8.27 million passengers passing through the 39 airports operated by us in Malaysia, up from 7.93 million from the previous corresponding period. Our flagship KL International Airport (KLIA) also saw higher passenger growth of 3.3% to 4.99 million in November.
Ever mindful of improving our airport guests’ experience and taking note of their feedback from the surveys we conducted, we joined the worldwide ‘Silent Airport’ movement of reducing the number of public announcements made. We implemented this initiative last month at both terminals in KLIA, KLIA Main and klia2, and plan to extend this to our other airports in the near future.
We continue in our efforts to encourage our passengers to embrace technology for their travel needs via the usage of the MYairports mobile apps that we have introduced not too long ago. This handy tool provides them with real-time flight status updates, boarding gates information and wayfinding features.