KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 2 (Bernama) -- The Asia Pacific airport industry should post better earnings in 2010, albeit in the lower single digit, as compared to the flat growth expected this year, Airports Council International (ACI) Asia-Pacific president Max Moore-Wilton said Monday.

He said this was on hope that the various governments' measures taken to stimulate the economy in the region would bring back passengers, as traffic had declined during the current global recession.

"The massive (aviation) growth in China and India has slowed down, and more so in the business passenger segment since hit by the current financial crisis. But we are now starting to see encouraging signs," he told reporters at the ACI World & Asia-Pacific Conference and Exhibition 2009 here.

Airports are also increasingly gaining revenue through their commercial side rather than from aeronautical charges, said Moore-Wilton.

"Passengers have kept up their spending in airports and to some extent, it is more buoyant than airline charges," he said.

At the same event, ACI World chairman James Cherry said the industry was doing better in the second half of this year compared to the first half, although the decline in the business segment had affected not only airlines but airports as well.

"Airlines can find other ways to reduce their costs but we don't have that kind of flexibility. Our costs tend to be relatively fixed and we need to be fair to our passengers as well," he said.

"We are sensitive to that kind of drop in traffic," he added.

On another development, Cherry said that capital investment in airports worldwide is expected to reach US$50 billion in a couple of years following more modernisation and upgrading projects.

"There is a great deal of investments to be launched in many parts of the world," he said.

Capital investment this year is projected to touch US$47 billion, a slight increase from US$42 billion spent in 2008.

However, airports are projected to spend only US$46.5 billion in 2010 due to some limitations in gaining infrastructure capital, Cherry said.

He said that airport projects and their investments had been planned before the financial crisis and the project cycles could not be turned on and off immediately.

-- BERNAMA