The air freight sector has been hit hard by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, but the crisis has also resulted in innovation and new partnerships.According to Jade da Costa, the chief commercial officer for Aero-Africa, with global capacity on all carriers down, capacity has been tight and rates high.“Capacity restrictions impacted all markets.
At the same time air freight demand increased dramatically,” he told Freight News. “It required innovative thinking to create solutions in line with the carrier capacity and routing from specific origins.”Da Costa said the pandemic had, however, allowed the company the opportunity to work with new partners in various markets in the US, Europe and Asia.
“Our main drive and focus was to deliver new creative products to our clients in Africa. An example is a weekly product we have created from various drop origin points in the US via our European partners for transit hubs into several African destinations.”Commenting on the challenges, Da Costa said capacity restrictions continued to hamper operations. “Certain carriers are still preferring a high yield on certain trades, for example China-US, which leaves capacity problems in Africa. We are still experiencing backlogs of cargo at specific origin stations, but more importantly, the transhipment airports are under extreme pressure and still have delays.”
He remains positive saying the outlook for the next few months is good – especially on certain trade routes such as China-Africa where rates are coming down week on week. Air freight rates, however, are still expected to rise in coming months due to the ongoing capacity restrictions.“What we need to do, however, is start planning for the future.
There will be a huge demand for the Covid-19 vaccine distribution globally. While we are still not sure where the supply will come from, maybe Europe or perhaps India, it will put huge demands on capacity.”Da Costa said as an industry the air freight sector needed to take the time now to better understand the requirements and demands of moving the vaccine. I
t will also call for more collaboration across the industry.“Collaboration in the world has changed in a very short period. For the global supply chain to work it has become a relay race – and it will require multiple companies involved at different levels to ensure that the final-mile delivery can be achieved,” he said. “We have to work together and this crisis has allowed us to do just that. It has introduced the change. We are going to have to collaborate and partner more going forward, be more innovative, and create products very differently.”
