Germany’s largest airport management, Fraport, released their traffic figures for 2015 for the group at the end of last week. Whereas in Frankfurt the passenger figures reached a new peak, the cargo volumes went down.
Airline fleet consolidation and strikes affect take-off and landing statistics
Frankfurt registered a total of 468,153 take-offs and landings in 2015. This is down just 0.2% on 2014 and is attributed to the increasing fleet consolidation by many carriers whereby larger
aircraft sometimes replace more frequencies.
The airport management is convinced that the figure would have however been higher if weather and strike (Lufthansa cockpit and cabin crews) related flight cancellations would have not
occurred.
Record pax figures
For the first time ever Frankfurt airport passenger traffic exceeded the 60 million mark. A total of just over 61 million passengers were registered for the year.
This, according to Dr. Stefan Schulte, Fraport’s Executive Board Chairman, underlines the importance of having decided to build Terminal 3 on the other side of the airport.
Ground breaking work for the new terminal has just begun.
Cargo turns out again as the loser
The continued downward slide in air freight volumes also affected Germany’s largest airport.
Airfreight and airmail volumes handled went down by a further 2.3 percent to around 2.1 million metric tons.
The airport managers and carriers attribute this to the continued weakness of global trade and the economic setbacks in emerging markets where higher hopes for trade expansion had been set.
Whether the figures for 2016 will be any better or even worse remains to be seen.
Plans are still going ahead for constructing new cargo handling facilities in the Cargo City South area where it is hoped that cargo handlers who are still in the old fashioned and out-of-date
facilities there will move into new premises.
Fraport Group international holdings show differing results
Some airports in the Fraport group portfolio showed good results for 2015 whereas others did not, particularly those in the Mediterranean area.
Antalya Airport in Turkey recorded a 1.6 percent drop in passengers as did Bulgaria’s Varna and Burgas airports which showed a combined drop of 4.1 percent.
St. Petersburg, suffering under the Russian passenger slowdown recorded a 5.4 percent drop in 2015.
In contrast, Hannover, Ljubljana, Lima, and Xi‘an Airport in China all showed healthy passenger increases.
Xi‘an was the star in the group with a 13 percent increase up to 33 million passengers.
It remains to be seen what the P + L figures will show for the Fraport Group during the past year.
It can be assumed however that they will be near to or maybe somewhat better than 2014’s €252 million profit.
John Mc Donagh
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