If the market is as large as that (and why would the Air China manager get
this wrong!), then it means an average of (drum roll please!).... 671 passengers per day. 335 there, 336 back. Not quite "100 people" is it?
There is an few issue with this however:
-335 each way is based on splitting the market over all of the China destinations this 245,000 per year covers. Therefore, you have to fight up against carriers already offering 1 stop to the various other Chinese cities and then brings your average load down.
MAN-PEK-PVG would be competing with MAN-DXB/DOH/LHR/CDG/MUC/ETC-PVG so to gain a decent cabin load on the initial MAN-PEK sector could need a fairly hefty price decrease and then the yield on such a long route comes into question.
Yield wise, MAN is the ideal candidate for a tag-on, and then if this is the case, unless MAN is the intermediate stop (such as LIS-MAN-PEK), you are effectively the poor cousin of intra-China connections as you already have the disadvantage of being 2 stop over those carriers offering 1 stop to the larger Chinese cities.
Anyway, all of these arguments could be irrelevant as I have been told that my initial post about the email is actually not based on the August 2013 quote, but a more recent one from January 21st 2014 and thus the different wording (I went back and asked why the quote was so old). Again I cannot seem to locate this new source.
As for the people who say China links cannot be sustained in the regions, well, while the economics may not be known and in this case they may well be right (why else would there be no MAN-HKG/PEK route despite the obvious pax pool), there has been a practice in the industry for years that airports north of London cannot support long haul apparently.
The funniest moment was when I had the chance to meet one of these analysts who share this mentality last year, and he was completely taken aback that Emirates and Singapore Airlines flew a first class cabin out of Manchester. Knew nothing about it and told 'Well, that will never work'. 'Has been working for 3 years now' was my response. Silence followed. Way to show your knowledge!