Tourists Flood Thai Airports, AOT Gains Confidence Back with 8% Passengers Growth
The long plunge of AOT’s share may come to an end after the company reveals that in 2018 FY, the number of passengers has grown by 8%.
Not long ago, The Ministry of Tourism and Sports revealed a decreased number of Chinese tourists and “Morgan Stanley” also downgraded Airports of Thailand Public Company Limited (AOT)’s shares from ฿97/share to ฿69/share, spread fear to all investors in the market.
For over a month that people doubted if Thai tourism would be able to regain its spot as a top destination for travellers, and today, AOT slams a set of data to show an 8% increment of passengers in 2018 fiscal year (Oct. 2017 – Sep. 2018). The data shows 139.52 million passengers in total had visited Thailand with 875,000 flights from all six airports. Suvarnabhumi Airport was flooded with over 62 million passengers, and Don Mueang Airport served over 40.56 million passengers that exceeded both airports capacity.
The top 10 nationalities that visited Thailand were from China, South Korea, Japan, India, Malaysia, Russia, America, Hong Kong, Singapore, and England. In this fiscal year, a total of 19.79 million Chinese passengers had travelled to Thailand.
Furthermore, AOT expects new emerging passengers (businessman, specialist etc.) to be travelling back and forth once the Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC) starts to kick in. Meanwhile, a large number of tourists are also expected to visit Thailand in December, which is considered a high season of tourism.
The data revealed by AOT has sent positive sentiment to investors, resulting in an increase of 1.20% or ฿0.75 at ฿63.25/share for AOT’s share on October 31, 2018, at 11:45.