Turbulence ahead for airfreight

Airfreight needs to prepare for an already tight market becoming even tighter as an ongoing capacity crunch looks likely to be ramped even further by political and policy changes. 

“I would start managing expectations of the CFO,” Niall Van der Wouw, Chief Airfreight Officer for ocean and airfreight benchmarking and market analytics platform Xeneta told an end-of-year webinar. He also suggested companies turn to indexing for what he called “operational stability.” Such a response, he said, was not a price guarantee but was a way to ensure goods got moved. 

Xeneta’s basic argument is the world economy will be similar in 2025 to this past year, with flattish GDP growth and easing inflation supporting discretionary spending and, with it, demand. Helping the industry big time is e-commerce powering ahead and looking likely to do so for the coming few years at 14 percent growth annually, said Van der Wouw, citing American Bureau of Commerce and unnamed consultancies projections. “There is still a lot of growth,” he said…