Air freight market sees more pessimism heading into 2012

Air freight has suffered more badly than container shipping recently, with Asia-Pacific being badly hit and views on the direction of the market appear to be deteriorating.

Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA) saw volumes fall by 8.2% in October to 342,000 tonnes despite a respectable growth in passengers and aircraft movements. The fall in cargo volumes appears to be accelerating, with traffic over the last six months down by 7.5%, whilst over the past twelve months it is down 2.3%. HKIA attributed the fall to the "worldwide negative growth trend". Volumes between Europe, North America and Taiwan all "experienced double-digit year-on-year declines in overall cargo traffic". Surprisingly so did traffic between the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong. Export traffic fell by 8% year-on-year as did exports whilst trans-shipments fell by 10%. However, some of the falls in the Asia Pacific region could be partially attributed to the floods in Thailand.

This sense of a deteriorating market has been reinforced by reports of an investment freeze at Lufthansa. Earlier in the week, Lufthansa Cargo announced that it would postpone investment in new terminal facilities at Frankfurt airport citing the ban on night flights. Andreas Otto, the head of sales at Lufthansa Cargo has also been quoted as telling journalists at a conference in Frankfurt this week that the company was planning to cut capacity by 20%-30% in order to respond to an expected fall in demand over the next two quarters.

It is not unusual for air cargo providers to temporarily ground air freighters after Christmas due to seasonal falls in volume; however it appears that Lufthansa thinks that there will be an absolute fall in demand as compared with last year. The reports of an investment freeze across the whole of Lufthansa’s business were reported by Reuters as coming from leaked comments made to the workforce by the airlines CEO, Christoph Franz who said it was a necessary response to improve the finances of the company.

Quelle: eyefortransport
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