Why Malaysia Airport will be fantastic

You think that the airport business is an old, lazy, uninteresting business. Not so in Asia and especially Malaysia. The competition among airlines (not airports) I guess has caused traffic to increase by leaps and bounds to the Malaysian airports.

Some statistics just as reported today.

And the commentary from the company itself:

"Malaysia Airports handled 7.27 million passenger movements, an increase of 27.8% over August 2012. It is a record high for the system of airports surpassing the 7million mark for the first time and being the highest passenger movements achieved for a month to date. Before 2013, the previous highest record achieved was 6.57 million recorded in December 2012 which traditionally has been the highest passenger movements month. Encouragingly May, June and August 2013 also outperformed December 2012. International passengers reached 3.45 million, registering a 25.1% year-on-year increase while domestic passengers recorded 30.4% growth with 3.82 million passengers. The sound performance in particular for the domestic sector was unexpected as Hari Raya Festive Season also fell on the same month last year with a double digit growth of 13.1%. This is a double digit growth over the previous double digit growth in August 2012. The longer school holidays complemented by competitive air fares and sufficient seat capacity partly contributed to the remarkable growth. It is encouraging to note that the international sector’s equal credible growth was driven by inbound tourists that have gained momentum backed by tourism campaign for VMY 2014, new airlines operation, additional airlines’ seat capacity and oneworld effect. With the oneworld alliance and higher transfers within AirAsia group, the monthly transfer traffic at KL International Airport has increased by about 100,000 per month and it is increasing from month to month."

Like I have said before, while the airlines are fighting themselves out - Malaysia Airport is enjoying. A simple business - in fact a monopoly if you look at it. Nothing difficult, but sometimes in life we just have to accept and get on with it as I do not like monopolies either. How hard it is to clean the airport toilet, manage air-traffic, mop and polish the floors, manage some tenants.

The harder part is to compete for customers but this is apparently not the job of Malaysia Airport but Airasia, Malindo, Cathay Pacific etc. Of course, Malaysia Airport does pretty well in bringing in additional airlines but that is still easier as compared to what the airlines have to compete on.

Why have I not been blogging?

Every time, I have to learn something new, it excites me - however, in the last 1 month I obviously have to learn fast on something I do not know and it is now part of my job. I have to focus on something else which is not stocks although it allows me to follow up on some companies which I have not been following most of the time.

Anyway, over that period, the market have been very volatile - CI dropping to almost 1700 and now it is hovering around 1800 points. Over that last one month as well, I have been travelling locally, and I have been trying on all the local flight operators - Airasia, Malindo, MAS, Firefly. The only one which I have not taken is probably Berjaya Air. That experience caused me to probably now change some of my perception over how I perceived Airasia to be. It is facing some really tough competition as some other players are really trying hard. Malindo for example - the one flying off from KLIA has a whole new fleet of new planes and nicer too. Prices are now much much more competitive - to the benefit of consumers and now we have the choice of better facilities provided in an airplane as compared to the one provided by Airasia.

For a while as a Malaysian, I am really spoilt for choice as I can decide to either stop at Subang (Firefly, Malindo) or KLIA (Malindo, MAS) or Airasia through LCCT and they are really affordable. The only other thing which I faced though is that MAS' flight was late 3 out of 4 times. I guess somethings may never change.All these will augur well for Malaysia Airport.

On other stuffs, results from many of my portfolio seems to be decent. I felt that DKSH, NTPM, Padini, Jobstreet seems to be doing well except for Parkson. Frankly, at this point of time, I am very comfortable with the list of companies in the portfolio - which is also why I have not been posting much. Ya, running out of stocks for the moment. The good thing for me is that the ones which I have been buying and following have not performed that well in terms of price - i.e. Padini and Keuro. Does that mean locking up more of those?