KUALA LUMPUR, May 31 — Malaysia Airports Holdings Bhd’s (MAHB) net profit for the first quarter ended March 31, 2019, dropped to RM149.58 million from RM444.59 million posted in the same quarter last year.

Revenue, however, improved three per cent to RM1.25 billion from RM1.22 billion thanks to the increased overall passenger growth of 3.7 per cent.

"Malaysia operations recorded passenger growth of 3.7 per cent (international: +0.8 per cent, domestic: +7.0 per cent) to 25.3 million passengers as compared with the corresponding quarter last year of 24.4 million passengers.

"The passenger traffic for Turkey operations increased by 3.8 per cent (international: +20.0 per cent, domestic: -3.8 per cent) to 8.1 million passengers as compared with 7.8 million passengers recorded in the corresponding quarter last year,” the airport operator said in a filing with Bursa Malaysia today.

Moving forward, MAHB said it remained optimistic that the projected 4.9 per cent growth for 2019 would be achieved with the future seat capacity filings by airlines was expected to remain above expectations.

The domestic traffic correction and consolidation are expected to continue while the international sector may also see improvement, it added.

The airport operator also said that the recent grounding of the Boeing 737MAX might have further negative impact on Indonesian carriers’ capacity to Malaysia.

However, the impact from this may not be significant as most of the Indonesia sectors have competing airlines, it said. — Bernama