It is indeed strangely worded...looking for a bit of free advertising maybe?
I think part of the reason is that the growth is not what EK was expecting... personally I think they have been expecting 20% growth year round which hasn't been achieved every month for whatever reason.
Decided to do a bit of digging through the thread at the numbers for this year so far:
Jan – 18351 (+18%)
Feb – 16980 (+21%)
Mar – 18517 (+5%)
Apr – 20211 (+22%)
May – 14382 (+13%)
Jun – 14693 (-7%)
Jul – 18726 (+9%)
It's a very mixed bag - maybe they are looking for some consistency year round and in particular the quiet months? And as the article says, from those calculations its an average 11.5% growth for the first half of 2014.
Looking at Wiki's stats, EK carried 199,025 in 2013, an average of 272 per flight so 63.6% LF... will be interesting to see the overall 2014 figures at the end of the year.