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Slump in July air cargo volume, US revenues worst reported

THE volume of the global air cargo market in July edged up slightly by 0.7 per cent - the lowest monthly growth so far this year, while air freight revenues, in US dollar terms, were also the worst reported for 2015, reported London's freightweek.

The highest volume growth was in Africa again, up 6.2 per cent, mainly due to increased business to the Middle East and South Asia (MESA) and within Africa. Europe again followed, this time with a 2.7 per cent volume increase, mainly fuelled by growth to destinations in Asia Pacific other than China. Latin America remained in the doldrums.

The origins of China and Hong Kong traffic combined (CN/HK) were outperformed year on year by the rest of the world (RoW) for six of the last nine months. For the last 12 months: CN/HK +3.1 per cent, RoW +4.5 per cent; for the 12 months before that: CN/HK +7.9 per cent, RoW +5.5 per cent; and for the last nine months, CN/HK +1.8 per cent, RoW +3.8 per cent.

In terms of destinations served from China, North America kept growing in 2015 and Europe kept dwindling. MESA, and in particular South Asia, showed continuing growth ex China.

While CN/HK outbound volumes recorded a growth of 1.8 per cent only, inbound volumes (+3.5 per cent) kept pace with the worldwide volume growth of 3.4 per cent.

However, there were large regional differences: Volumes to CN/HK from Africa, Europe and MESA all went down, by 22 per cent, 3.0 per cent and 9.4 per cent respectively. The Americas profited by bringing their volumes up by 17.5 per cent. Volumes from Asia Pacific to CN/HK increased by 7.9 per cent, recording the strongest growth in absolute terms.

This development brought the region's share of total worldwide volumes to CN/HK up from 36.9 per cent to 38.4 per cent, another indicator for the quickly shifting panels in world trade.