July 2015 was a rather flat month in the air cargo market with volume growth of only 0.7 per cent – the worst month recorded in terms of growth and revenue for 2015, according to World ACD.
In previous years, July was much better than June, but not so this year, World ACD noted. The origin Africa again grew most (+6.2 per cent in volume) thanks to increased business to the Middle East and South Asia (MESA) and within Africa. Europe again followed, this time with a 2.7 per cent volume increase, mainly fueled by growth to destinations in Asia Pacific other than China. Latin America remained in the doldrums.
The yield story is unchanged as well: compared to the previous month, yields including charges (in USD) dropped again by 1.8 per cent. “For both the transatlantic and the transpacific market, we observed that yields in USD held up better from than to North America. Contrary to what other sources reported recently, we did not see westbound yields improve in July over June,” the data analysis organization said.
“Our database, the largest of its kind, capturing all worldwide transactions of over 50 airlines with more than 16,000 agents, showed a drop of 3.2 per cent, worse than the decrease in the worldwide average.
“With all the recent news about China’s woes, this is a good moment to try to put some perspective to the stories going around. It used to be said that air cargo developments were the bellwether – or leading indicator – for what would happen in the general economy nine months later. Could that still be the case? Note that the origins China & Hong Kong combined (CN/HK) were outperformed year-on-year by the rest of the world (RoW) for six of the last nine months.”
World ACD pointed to the last 12 months: CN/HK +3.1 per cent, RoW +4.5 per cent. For the 12 months before that: CN/HK +7.9 per cent, RoW +5.5 per cent while for the last 9 months, CN/HK +1.8 per cent, RoW +3.8 per cent.
Looking at the compound growth over the past three years in outbound volumes, the Pearl River delta (China South East +37 per cent and HK +4 per cent) did much better than the Shanghai area (flat) and the Northeast, with the latter actually experiencing a decline over the full period.
The west was not at all affected by the country’s recent slump: it recorded a compound growth of 81 per cent, albeit from a modest base. Yet, its contribution to China’s outbound total grew from a modest six to 10 per cen t in three years. In terms of destinations served from China, North America kept growing in 2015 and Europe kept dwindling, trends we already noted for 2012. MESA, and in particular South Asia, showed continuing growth ex China.
Lastly, World ACD points to the YoY figures for the destination China over the past nine months. While CN/HK outbound volumes recorded a growth of 1.8 per cent only, inbound volumes (+3.5 per cent) kept pace with the worldwide volume growth of 3.4 per cent.
“But we noted large regional differences. Volumes to CN/HK from Africa, Europe and MESA all went down, by 22, 3 and 9.4 per cent respectively. The Americas profited by bringing their volumes up by 17.5 per cent and volumes from Asia Pacific to CN/HK increased by 7.9 per cent, recording the strongest growth in absolute terms. This development brought the region’s share of total worldwide volumes to CN/HK up from 36.9 to 38.4 per cent, another indicator for the quickly shifting panels in world trade.