Back in February, the world looked reasonably normal. Today, we wonder whether ‘normal’ will ever return, as air cargo markets have been uprooted like never before. Market parties see increases and decreases in their business that would have been regarded – until very recently - as wholly unrealistic.
And so, people look for information, now more than ever. However, different analysts show different trends, and the air cargo world struggles to make sense of all data presented. To show high-level, worldwide market trends in stable times, data need not be based on very detailed inputs. But in today’s frenzied markets, almost all individual players (are forced to) each go their own different way, resulting in starkly different business patterns. That specific situation calls for detailed analyses of the largest possible data sets, without which it will be impossible to generate truly representative data.
WorldACD presents its data for the month of April 2020, based on the full worldwide Air Way Bill data and capacity & load data of 65 resp. 45 (mostly very large) airlines having reported so far.
Worldwide, chargeable weight carried by air, decreased with 31.7% compared with April 2019 (year-over-year, YoY), and by 22.8% compared with March 2020 (month-over-month (MoM). Due to the well-publicized lack of cargo capacity, caused by the forced inactivity of many passenger (!) aircraft, airline yields (in USD/kg) went up very sharply, by 63% MoM, and by 99% YoY. Express business fared better than regular cargo (-8% MoM), particularly from Asia Pacific (+21% MoM). The category of smallest parcels (0-50 kg) suffered most (-42% MoM), whilst – not surprisingly – big shipments of more than 5000 kilograms were heavily favored: they hardly lost ground, while upping yields by more than average. And so, in the midst of aviation’s biggest crisis, worldwide air cargo revenues went up in April, by 36% YoY and by 26% MoM.
Mother’s Day in the USA
Let’s also take a look at a few of the largest country-to-country markets. The best and the worst markets both originated in Hong Kong: to Saudi Arabia (weight +207%, revenue +330% MoM), and to Japan (weight -27%, revenue -30% MoM). China-East to Germany was one of the most impressive markets: weight +57%, revenue +281% MoM.
But the performance that made WorldACD believe that – thankfully - some things remain normal after all, was in the market Colombia – USA Atlantic South. Its MoM weight growth was 64%, prompted by the vast amounts of flowers transported to the United States for Mother’s Day, with a spike between April 21 and April 29.