Dubai: Emirates, the world’s largest airline by international passengers, believes this week’s devaluation of the Chinese yuan will not hurt passenger numbers like last year’s crash in the Russian rouble.

China’s government devalued its currency three times this week to 6.7 yuan against the US dollar, a change of three and half per cent. A weaker yuan against the dollar means more expensive flights for Emirates Chinese passengers because the dirham is pegged to the dollar.

Emirates is confident China’s population of over a billion means there is “still huge opportunity” for the airline even if the middle class are affected by the devaluation, Shaikh Majid Al Mualla, Divisional Senior Vice-President, Commercial Operations — Centre, told reporters at a press conference on Thursday at the Emirates Group headquarters.

“We have been facing currency furcations many times, we faced worse currency depreciation [than the yuan],” he said.

Emirates flies twice daily to Beijing and Shanghai and daily to Guangzhou, according to its website, and China was Dubai’s largest trading partner in 2014.

“We are not covering the whole country … we have very small proportion of the market share so the opportunities are always there,” Shaikh Majid said.

Emirates has warned at least twice in the past 12 months that currency fluctuations in Europe, Russia, the United Kingdom and Australia were limiting the benefits lower oil prices were having on profits.

Shaikh Majid said in the Russian market passenger numbers have almost halved because of the falling rouble. “The thing about Russia, yes, we almost dropped 50 per cent of the traffic,” he said.

The rouble almost halved against the dollar last year due to low oil prices and European and US sanctions and has so far weakened by a further 10 per cent this year.

But if the devalued yuan, which shook global markets this week over concerns it will weaken China’s buying power, was to start affecting passenger numbers, the airline could respond by adjusting capacity on routes.

“The good thing about us is we have movable assets, if one route is not doing well we move them next week to other places,” Shaikh Majid said.