Macau’s civil aviation market is facing four major challenges, namely insufficient internal demand, slow pace of market liberalisation, failure of professional training to keep pace with development needs, and increasingly fierce regional competition, Macau Institute of Management (MIM) President Samuel Tong Kai Chung said yesterday.
Tong’s institute held a press conference regarding its “Strategies for the Development of Macau’s Civil Aviation Market in the Context of the Guangdong-Macau In-depth Cooperation Zone in Hengqin” research report at the Macau Chamber of Commerce Building in Zape.
“Macau’s civil aviation industry is constrained by a number of conditions…… firstly, our domestic market is too small due to the relatively small size and homogeneity of our population and industrial structure; secondly, our market is not open enough in which we only have had one locally based airline since the opening of the Macau International Airport in 1995 due to institutional barriers; thirdly, the supply of human resources is not able to catch up with the needs of the market with only a few of the local tertiary-education institutions offering bachelor’s degree or other degree programmes in science, technology or management and there are also relatively few professional training programmes in aviation; and fourthly, regional competition is getting more and more intense with the increasing number of airports in Guangdong province – including in Hong Kong and Macau – in the future,” Tong said.
To address the shortfall in domestic demand for Macau’s civil aviation, Tong proposed in his research to set up city lounges with multimodal transport functions in the nine mainland cities in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area (GBA) and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HSAR), as well as a logistics park at the Macau International Airport in the western part of Guangdong, while encouraging airlines to develop more connecting and mid-way routes.
In terms of accelerating the opening up of the market on all fronts, Tong suggested the government speed up the orderly opening-up of the access market for locally based airlines, increase the number of airline contracts signed, explore the establishment of a new type of multilateral mechanism, and promote the signing of regional economic and trade cooperation agreements with more economic and trade partners, while in terms of the high-quality development of Macau’s civil aviation industry, he urged the government to study the feasibility of establishing a port management entity in the Greater Bay Area, and to do a good job in nurturing talents at all levels of the civil aviation industry.
Tong also suggested studying the feasibility of establishing a GBA Airport Group funded by the governments of Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macau to promote the efficiency of resource allocation in the civil aviation market and avoid excessive competition among the airports in the GBA, as well as to take the initiative to expand passenger and cargo routes with the Belt and Road (B&R) nations and Portuguese-speaking countries (PSCs).
Macau Institute of Management (MIM) President Samuel Tong Kai Chung looks on during yesterday’s press conference about his “Strategies for the Development of Macau’s Civil Aviation Market in the Context of the Guangdong-Macau In-depth Cooperation Zone in Hengqin” research report, at the Macau Chamber of Commerce Building in Zape. – Photo: Yuki Lei
