'Unlimited' potential for project cargo growth

Africa’s potential for growth in project cargo shipments is almost unlimited due to the boom in oil, gas and mining and the infrastructure backlog. Lyndee du Toit, managing director of Air Charter Service (ACS) South Africa, a global service provider with interests across the continent, said the company was currently securing the most bookings to southern and northern Africa from clients with interests in the oil, gas and mining sectors. Du Toit said the level of growth and demand in the sector had remained “strong and consistent” over the past six months. “Africa has almost unlimited potential for project shipments. Project cargo is huge due to a combination of the huge resource industries and the fact that infrastructure is so far behind the rest of the world,” Du Toit said. “For the foreseeable future there will be steady demand for the movement of building materials and even on the odd occasion whole buildings,” she said. Du Toit said the business was handling requests and bookings from North America, Europe and Asia to send project shipments across Africa. “Resource-based shipments to North Africa are very common. They are continuously discovering more and more oil, gas and minerals so the level of activity has been very high,” she said. Du Toit said the business had also experienced a spike in demand for aid and relief to West Africa. “Obviously with the Ebola outbreak West Africa has almost completely shut down from a project shipment standpoint, although we are f lying aid in from the west and our passenger divisions are coordinating evacuations,” she said. “While there is the demand, the list of operators who are willing to f ly there is shortening. This has meant that we’ve relied heavily on our most trusted contacts to complete the bookings we have got,” she said. “We’ve helped get relief shipments in that many others cannot and no matter how small a difference it makes, we have been working around the clock to help those in need,” she said. Du Toit added that the freeze on most commercial shipments into West Africa would create a future demand to clear the backlog as well as requests for charters to get relief equipment out of the region. ACS moved more than 30 million kilograms of cargo globally in 2013.