“I met Sri Lanka’s Minister of Culture and Tourism by chance in 2012. Unfortunately, I couldn’t speak English fluently and there were repeated mentions of Kandy Municipal. I thought they were talking about sweets,” Sky Asia Chairman Yoo Sun-ha recounts in an interview with Korean Herald.

“The most important thing in the cable car business is the number of tourists,” Yoo says. “How many tourists per year come to where I want to build a cable car and how does the number of visitors vary per month?” For Yoo, the magic threshold is 2.5 million visitors per year. Before that, such a project would be too risky for him.

Kandy lies in the centre of Sri Lanka and is one of the largest tourist cities in the South Asian country. In 1988, the entire city was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It records an average of five million visitors per year.

The number of visitors to Kandy’s most famous tourist attraction, the Royal Botanical Gardens, is roughly two million per year. According to Yoo’s on-site research, the proportion of foreign tourists is only 12%. The Chairman of Sky Asia is therefore not worried by the coronavirus.

Korean Herald reports that despite the COVID-19 pandemic, construction will begin during the coming year. It is planned that the 2.2-kilometre installation will be completed by the end of 2022. The cable car will connect the city centre of Kandy to Hanthana mountain and cost an estimated 35 million US dollars.