Griffiths: Dubai Airports World's Best Connected

Bloomberg

5 days ago

CC-Transcript
00:00Talk us through some of the trends in the volumes that you've been seeing in the first half of this year. Well, certainly it's been a great first half for the entire city. We've seen an average monthly traffic hit 7.7 million customers per month, which is a new record. It cements our position for the 11th year running as the world's busiest international airport, with the busiest month being January with 8.5 million customers through Q2 was our busiest so far, 22.5 million customers through the airports. And despite, as you said earlier, the some of the disruption we had, that really did not affect our business. And we are on course to achieve a record year. Something like 96 million customers expected through our doors by the end of this current year. So I think trading results have been very good load factors on our airlines very high. And we're getting a record numbers of flights, numbers of airlines, different numbers of cities in our network. So all good. Yeah. So 96 million is still the target for the end of this year. When do you when do you think you're going to join the 100 million club? Well, I think we'll be the only member of the 100 million club, hopefully during the course of 2020. So we're fairly confident that the airline growth that we're seeing at DXP and DWC will continue to be strong. We've now got forecasts, as you say, 96,000,020 26. We're pretty sure we're going to hit that 100 million mark, 269 destinations directly from Dxp, 92 International Airlines, and you can reach 107 countries from Dxp. So I think we're not only the world's busiest international airport, but we are hopefully also the world's best connected. Talk us through the operational impact, the brief closure of the Dubai airspace had on the airports and how you thought about it. Just walk us through the decision making of what happens during that episode of the Iran Israel war and the decision making you had to make. Right. Quite at the top of the world's most international and busiest airport. It was an interesting time and we were very fortunate that we've consolidated all of our systems into a quite unique airport operations control center, which is staffed 24/7. I was in touch with them throughout the time. Fortunately, the disruption was minimal and it lasted for very short amounts of time. And the resilience of our customer base, I think shone through. We were only down 3.9% in the single month during May and June and down in flights and 5.5% in customers. But we've seen an incredible bounce back and I think the projections for the year are unchanged as a result of the resilience of the customer base. And I think that's testimony to the fact that Dubai is seen as a very, very good place to live, to work, good for commerce, good for tourism, and very well connected. Has there been any change in the geographical breakdown of where visitors are coming from? No, we've still got the same breakdown with India being our top market 5.9 million customers during the course of the first half of the year. KSA 3.6 million, the UK 3 million. Pakistan 2.1 million and the US 1.6 million. And those numbers really don't change. Certainly the ranking doesn't change. And as you see on the screen now, London, Riyadh, Mumbai, Jeddah and New Delhi being the top five. Now in our route structure. Yeah. Well, what would you say is the split between passenger transiting and passengers actually stopping at Dubai as a final destination? And how does it impact the profitability, overall profitability of Dubai Airports having one of the other. Well, it's been really interesting because we thought as we were outgrowing some of the other airline and airport combinations across the world that our transit customers would exceed significantly the growth of our point to point markets. But the good thing is that actually we've seen none of that. We've seen actually a resilience, particularly in the point to point markets where now about 60, 40% in favor of customers visiting Dubai. And of course, the economic multiplication that that brings to the city is enormous compared to those in transit. But obviously transit customers as well as point to point customers or both contribute to a very healthy airline network. And we've seen huge increases in airline load factors and large numbers of increases in flights as a result of that.