Perishable niche pays off for ground handler

Companies importing and exporting perishables through Lusaka International Airport now have a choice of ground handlers, with NAC2000 having built a cold room for vaccines and other temperature-sensitive cargo. Breaking into this market has inspired managing director Jonathan Lewis to help other small and growing Zambian companies to take advantage of export and other airfreight-related opportunities. He says the company has learned a lot since it built the cold room and started handling imports of vaccines, chocolate and even cakes, and the export of solidago, a filler used in flower arrangements. NAC2000 has worked closely with the solidago growers – a process which Lewis says “has been good for us”. The company has however built up experience in a variety of diversified areas – the handling of project cargo for the mines, ground handling for private charters into Lusaka, as well as managing the loading of cargo as sensitive and unusual as rhinos. Lewis now wants to help develop the capacity required to increase the volumes of freight and aircraft at the Lusaka, Livingstone and Ndola airports where NAC2000 has operations. “We have sponsored the training of a number of small entrepreneurs and groups of entrepreneurs to let them know about the opportunities and the challenges of exporting and importing,” he says. NAC2000’s newly developed understanding of the regulations governing the export of unprocessed agricultural products is shared with the entrepreneurs in order to help them break into export markets using airfreight. As a land-locked country, Zambia has to build businesses around airfreight in order to be competitive. Zambia, Lewis points out, has preferential trade agreements with a number of countries, and he believes more can be done to take advantage of the opportunities created by these agreements.