Air, Freight News

Airfreight shows signs of real recovery

[ July 2, 2020   //   Chris ]

June cargo volumes provided the first real indicators of structural recovery in the airfreight market says analyst CLIVE Data Services. PPE business faded but the industry seems to be slowly getting back up on its feet as volumes in the first four weeks climbed 6% versus the full four weeks of May.

Volumes in the last week of June were also 12% higher than in the final week of May. The year-on-year performance gap further closed with global volumes at -25% versus June 2019, compared to the -31% annual disparity for May.

Available capacity remained flat, but the last two weeks of June saw it creeping up slowly by around 1.5% per week.

CLIVE’s ‘dynamic loadfactor’ of 71% in June – based on both the volume and weight perspectives of cargo flown and capacity available – was at its highest since CLIVE began measuring the industry’s weekly performance in 2018.

CLIVE managing director, Niall van de Wouw, said:  “As governments around the world acted to protect their societies, they became unlikely (price-insensitive) customers of international air cargo capacity for urgent supplies of PPE…The big question has been ‘what happens when PPE volumes dry up?’. Now the noise of PPE is starting to fade, we can see where the industry is really at – and we do see an improvement.”

But he added: “In July, we would traditionally expect to see an influx of belly capacity for the summer holiday season, but that’s not there at the moment. The next test will be how an influx of ‘normal’ passenger flights, which are not driven by cargo demand, will impact dynamic load factor.”

Tags: Clive