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Foreign airlines are leaving China as domestic competitors expand abroad

STORY: Chinese airlines are gaining market share on international flights, according to industry data. That’s because foreign rivals are abandoning flights to the country, deterred by weak demand and rising costs, as well as lengthening flight times due to the need to avoid Russian airspace. Western carriers such as British Airways and Qantas are pulling services from China or choosing not to resume flights. British Airways said on Thursday (Aug. 8) it would suspend London-Beijing flights for a year for commercial reasons. Last month, it suspended one of its twice-daily London-Hong Kong flights for the same period. And Qantas cited half-empty planes and low demand for China travel when it suspended Sydney-Shanghai flights in July. Since the outbreak of war in Ukraine in 2022, Chinese airlines have continued to take shorter northern routes to Europe and North America over Russia’s vast airspace. In contrast, airlines in Europe, the U.S. and other countries are avoiding flights over the country. That’s either because they’ve been banned from the area by Moscow or their own governments, or because they’ve chosen not to fly over it for security reasons. That has widened Chinese airlines’ cost advantage and allowed them to capture a larger share of the international market. One analyst told Reuters the country’s airlines had cost savings of 30% compared with Western rivals. All of this meant that China had almost a quarter fewer flights abroad in July than in the same month before the pandemic. But local carriers like China Eastern operate 90% of their international flights, suggesting foreign carriers have pulled back.