Twists & turns
In 2016, profit margins were relatively low for most companies in the air freight industry and the supply chain.
Over the next 12 months following that year, the global trade remarkably turned around, growing at 3 percent, the highest
since 2011. This generated unprecedented sales volume in different sectors, including the air freight and aviation.
The Luxembourg-based Cargolux Airlines, for instance, publicly reported its net profits after taxes in 2016 totaled only US$5.5 million but in 2017 it shoot astonishingly to US$122.3 million. Profits were also reaped in historic proportions among other major freight carriers like LuxairCargo, Lufthansa, Emirates SkyCargo, and so on.
The global economic upturn is forecast to continue this year through 2019 at 3 percent growth rate, according to a United Nations economic report.
Along with the airlines, the profit taking also expanded to the General Sales Agent (GSA) sector.
ECS Group, one of the leading GSA companies globally, is seizing the opportunity to expand its global footprint, breaking new grounds where possible with the help of a highly advanced technological system that ensures seamless process in transporting goods anywhere in the world, investing more on people and all things digital to speed up things.
In this edition, ECS Group CEO Adrien Thominet shares his insights on what the foreseeable future may hold for the industry and how companies are carefully transforming themselves to adopt to what lies ahead in the digital age.
If China, with its ‘One Road, One Belt’ Silk Road vision, is an economic powerhouse, India is regarded as the “real Eldorado for all technologies development” says Thominet.
With an equally huge domestic market in excess of one billion, India’s e-Commerce industry is burgeoning, promising huge
potentials.
Technology is also enhancing the process of storing things as we touched on a feature about “smart warehouses” powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI).
These and more news and features in this latest edition of Air Cargo Update.
Gemma Q. Casas
Editor in Chief
