AirAsia X Berhad (“AAX” or “the Company”), the long-haul, low cost airline affiliate of the AirAsia Group is pleased to announce its operating statistics for the 1st Quarter 2015 (“1Q15”).

In line with the Company’s turnaround strategy which includes network consolidation exercise for First Half of 2015. The Company had, at the beginning of 2015, implemented frequency cut on certain routes, mainly China and Australia, and concurrently terminated loss making routes – Adelaide and Nagoya, to optimize capacity. The excess capacity from capacity management has re-deployed to short-term wet lease and charter operations, to maximize revenue.

As a result of capacity management and slowdown in marketing activities during the first 3 months of the year with respect to QZ incident, the Company saw its passenger traffic, as measured by Revenue-Passenger-KM (“RPK”), declined 17% year-on-year (“y-o-y”) to 4,431 million in 1Q15 from 5,339 million same quarter last year, while Available-Seat-KM (“ASK”) capacity decreased by 3% y-o-y to 6,020 million. Consequently, y-o-y load factor during the quarter dropped 12 percentage points (“ppts”) to 74% against 86% same period last year. Current bookings trends are in line with expectations for a recovery in the Second Half of 2015.

In terms of fleet movement, the Company took deliveries of 2 A330-300s on operating lease during the quarter, bringing its total number of A330-300s to 25 as compared to 19, in the same period last year.

On the associates, Thai AirAsia X registered strong loads of 82% for its 1Q15, with 155,961 passengers carried, implying continued positive pick-up for the popular routes between Thailand, Japan, and South Korea. Thai AirAsia X currently operates 3 A330-300s while Indonesia AirAsia X has 2 A330-300s serving Bali-Taipei and Bali-Melbourne respectively.