The global large widebody freighter market will likely remain supply constrained for the next 4-5 years at least. At the end of May Atlas announced a deal to acquire de facto commercial control of Air Atlanta’s operating platforms and ownerships of Air Atlanta’s fleet. Together, both companies will control around 60% of the global large widebody ACMI outsource business and about 13% of the large widebody freighter fleet. Will Atlas acquisition of Air Atlanta matter to the air cargo business? We think yes. Even though Air Atlanta is about one tenth of the size of Atlas the tie-up could have major implications for customers and competitors. In our minds the deal raises some fundamental questions: Will Atlas become more valuable? What is the upside for Air Atlanta? Will customers benefit? And will this create new opportunities for competitors? This article presents our thinking on each of these issues.
Posts tagged as “airfreight”
International air cargo is highly reliant on global supply chains and cross border e-commerce traffic. Both look like they will take a beating in 2025. In January we were still expecting growth of between 3.5% and 7.4% but our latest forecast foresees a range of between -0.1% and +0.7%. This is driven a weaker economic outlook globally as well the potential loss of about one third of transpacific air cargo volumes due to US de-minimis rule changes.
While much of the focus has been on surging transpacific air cargo, Asia Pacific to Europe has performed better even if overall westbound volumes are still around 12% below January 2022 peak levels. Over the past years there have been significant changes in how air cargo moves between Asia and Europe with both the Gulf and Central Asia increasing their share of traffic and some smaller European countries seeing a surge in inbound volumes. This article discusses the changes taking place in Asia to Europe air cargo.