Turkish Adds Guangzhou To China Network

Turkish Airlines continues to grow its number of eastbound services, with plans to add winter services to Guangzhou from its Istanbul Atatürk hub. Routes News investigates how the Turkish carrier plans to make Guangzhou a success.

Star Alliance member Turkish Airlines will add its third destination in China this winter with a planned flight to Guangzhou in Southern China. It currently flies five-times a week to both Beijing and Shanghai.

THE TURKISH AIRLINES STRATEGY

The Turkey to China market is strong with over 170,000 O&D passengers flying between April 09-10. Not surprisingly, Turkish Airlines dominates this market with 71% of the traffic.

However, its strategy in Guangzhou will be based on a wider strategy of gaining increased market share on the Europe-China routes, as well as African-China traffic flows.

According to IATA BSP data, over 5.6 million passengers flew between Europe and China in the past year (April 09-10) with Turkish Airlines having just a 3% of this market. The table below illustrates the top 10 carriers by passenger share between Europe and China

Source IATA BSP data April 09-10

Turkish will be seeking to increase its 3% share of the Europe to China traffic flows. It has a comprehensive European network of 66 destinations and over 703 weekly flights into Istanbul, which will be able to feed passengers from Europe to Guangzhou.

Turkish Airlines is also in the process of developing its African network by launching new service to Accra this month. Plus, in May it commenced services to Entebbe, Uganda and Dar El Salaam, Tanzania and now serves 15 destinations in Africa.

This provides a ready-made network to feed its Guangzhou service. There has been significant growth in Chinese oil worker and infrastructure development traffic to North and West Africa.

Air Algerie successfully operates a twice-weekly service from Algiers to Beijing, largely based on transporting oil workers into Algeria. This is one of just two non-stop services from Africa to China. The other one is a thrice-weekly service from Beijing to Cairo. However, over 921,000 passengers flew between Africa and China between April 09-10, of which Emirates has a 23% market share. Turkish will be hoping to grab some of this traffic.

Turkish Airlines will see itself as primarily competing against the Gulf carriers, specifically Emirates,Qatar and Etihad, in order to capture the traffic flows from Europe and Africa to China. The table below shows a comparison of the Turkish network to China against Emirates and Etihad.

Source Flightbase September 14-20, 2010

IATA BSP data shows that Guangzhou is a popular destination from Europe, with over 265,000 passengers travelling there between April 09-10. Over 71,000 of these passengers flew on the non-stop services that are available from Europe. This includes Air France's thrice-weekly service from Paris Charles de Gaulle, China Southern's four times weekly service from Charles de Gaulle and Lufthansa's thrice-weekly weekly flight from Frankfurt.

Turkish will be well positioned to capture traffic that is currently connecting rather than flying on these non-stop services from Europe.

Turkish will not only rely on passenger demand from Europe and Africa to China as the economics for the route will benefit for belly freight, with Guangdong Province being China's 'production workshop' and primary source of air cargo at the heart of the Pearl River Delta, which will boost Turkish's chances for success in Guangzhou.