Boeing lowers its 20-year annual air cargo growth rate forecast by 0.7pc

US AIRCRAFT manufacturer Boeing lowered its annual rate growth by 0.7 percentage points over the coming 20 years since its last projections in 2010, Bloomberg reports.

Boeing said the global freighter fleet will increase to 3,198 planes by 2031 from the current 1,738 of which 36 per cent will be larger freighters, up by five per cent from today's volume. The global fleet's expansion will increase by less than a fifth of the rate it forecast in 2011.

Despite an uptick in 2010, the industry has seen traffic declines in consecutive years which points to a "near-term market weakness" ending 2012 with a 0.4 per cent drop year-on-year but with growth, albeit slightly below forecast, in the long term, said Boeing.

It retained its forecast of Asia-Pacific region being the leader in growth and particularly in highest demand for new aircraft. Intra-Asia and domestic China traffic forecasts were down from eight per cent from 9.2 per cent in 2010, and to 6.9 per cent from 7.9 per cent over the same period.

Despite predicting rising fuel prices in its previous projections, it now expects prices to remain steady and with more efficient new aircraft coming into the global fleet for cost of air cargo to decline.

The profits of the global freight carriers, FedEx and UPS, is reflected in revenue down to less than five per cent in latest quarter 2012 from mid-2010 level of more than 10 per cent.

According to analyst Howard Rubel of New York's Jefferies & Co the revised forecast is a sign the world's economy is slowing down. "It's another benchmark that confirms what everybody else has seen or experienced," he said.