China Weighing on Asia, US Departures Falling

We track scheduled flights (what’s planned) and tracked flights (what took off) from a sample of the largest airports across the world.

Looking at data up to 5 September:

• Global departures fell 3pp WoW, they are at 82% of 2019 levels (Chart 1). The decline from summer highs, in line with historic seasonality, has been exacerbated by renewed lockdowns across China.
• Asian departures slid 4.8% this week with Chinese departures suffering the worst (Beijing -15.4% WoW, Shanghai -14.2% WoW Chart 4). The decline comes as China continues its zero-Covid restrictions. Recently, this has included extending lockdowns across Chengdu and Shenzhen.Bert expects a limited chance of China changing tack on zero-Covid rules until at least the critical CCP National Congress in November.
• Excluding China, the picture is not as bleak for the rest of Asia (-0.9% WoW; Chart 2). In comparison, the US (-2.5% WoW) is seeing departures decline at a far faster pace, in part due to Dallas (-6.6% WoW).Meanwhile, departures from Europe inched lower (-0.3% WoW).
• With the potential for Covid-19 cases to increase in the cooler seasons, the European Commission has proposed that member states begin preparing ‘ahead of the next wave [of Covid-19].’
• For more information on recent changes in COVID cases, please see our weekend report.

Information on long-term movements in-flight data is available below.

US

UK

Italy

Spain

Germany

France

Canada

China

Japan

Hong Kong

South Korea

Singapore

Thailand

Bilal Hafeez is the CEO and Head of Research at Macro Hive. He spent over twenty years doing research at big banks – JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, and Nomura, where he had various “Global Head” roles and did FX, rates and cross-markets research.

Ben Ford is a Researcher at Macro Hive. Ben studied BSc Financial Mathematics at Cardiff University and MSc Finance at Cass Business School, his dissertations were on the tails of GARCH volatility models, and foreign exchange investment strategies during crises, respectively.

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