November results help pave optimism for air freight performance in 2015

Welcome back to the Air Freight blog and a very happy New Year to you. Although we're still about a month away from seeing the final global air cargo/air freight data reports for 2014 some very encouraging results from November have just been released.

Continuing the trend seen in recent months November saw year-over-year (YoY) airfreight growth of 4.3% in total volume versus 2013, however the increase in yield for the same time period was not quite as encouraging reporting in at just 1.7%. Analysts align this figure to decreasing fuel costs which result in some curtailment of fuel surcharges.

It would seem that the ongoing port issues in the US are having some impact with the transpacific market leading global sector performance in November. Air Freight revenues from the Asia-Pacific market to North America rose by a staggering 17% fpr the month. Growth was also strong in Latin America and Africa with volume up by more than 7%, meanwhile a generally sluggish economy in Europe saw revenues again on the decline by almost 6% for the month.

While the focus tends to remain pointed towards China in terms of explosive growth, India is now showing near equal performance in terms of volume improvements. North American growth remains quite stable and it will be very interesting to watch to see whether some capacity issues in the market are gradually overcome over the next 12 months.

Economic stability coupled with good consumer confidence seems to point toward a strong 2015 in the United States and the hope is that growing inventories and a strong manufacturing trend will lead to a very positive year throughout the air freight sector. Although there are indicators that both the European and Russian markets are in risk of returning to recessionary levels, GDP in the United States remains positive with experts predicting economic growth of 2.5-3.0% this year. We feel that results during the first quarter of 2015 will go a long way to securing the optimism currently held in the air freight sector.