Revenue figures....worst reported this year
Air cargo market volumes 'stagnant' in July
, August 31, 2015
The air cargo market's volume of growth was only 0.7 per cent in July, which was a rather flat month, according to WorldACD Market Data.
No other month recorded a lower growth this year - with revenue figures also the worst reported this year, it said.
The African markket grew most in volume with 6.2 per cent, owing to increased business to the Middle East and South Asia (Mesa) and within Africa.
Europe again followed, a 2.7 per cent volume increase, mainly fueled by growth to destinations in Asia Pacific other than China. Latin America remained in the doldrums.
The yield story is unchanged as well: compared to the previous month, yields including charges dropped again by 1.8 per cent.
For both the Transatlantic and the Transpacific market, the yields held up better from than to North America. Contrary to what other sources reported recently, no westbound yields improved in July over June.
The database showed a drop of 3.2 per cent, worse than the decrease in the worldwide average (see also the monthly region-to-region yield indices on its website).
With all the recent news about China’s woes, this is a good moment to try to put some perspective to the stories going around.
It used to be said that air cargo developments were the bellwether – or leading indicator – for what would happen in the general economy nine months later.
The origins China and Hong Kong combined (CN/HK) were outperformed year-on-year by the rest of the world (RoW) for six of the last nine months, it said.
Looking at the compound growth over the past three years in outbound volumes, the Pearl River delta did much better than the Shanghai area and the Northeast: the latter actually experienced a decline over the full period.
The west was not at all affected by the country’s recent slump: it recorded a compound growth of 81 per cent, albeit from a modest base. Yet, its contribution to China’s outbound total grew from a modest six per cent to 10 per cent in three years.
In terms of destinations served from China, North America kept growing this year and Europe kept dwindling, trends that were already noted for 2012. Mesa, and in particular South Asia, showed continuing growth ex China.
Lastly, the year-on-year figures for the destination China over the past nine months. 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.
Large regional differences were, however, noted. Volumes to CN/HK from Africa, Europe and Mesa all went down, by 22 per cent, three 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. - TradeArabia News Service
