Despite a strong start for the air cargo business in the first quarter of this year, the underlying economic fundamentals point to more subdued growth for the remainder of the year. Compared to our last forecast prepared just under three months ago, we expect global air cargo growth for 2024 to be slightly lower - 8.9% vs 9.9%. Much of this is due to a slight downgrade of economic growth and trade projections, as well as a diminishing boost from cross border e-commerce volumes. Full year growth for 2024 will still be dependent on the recovery of manufacturing and small package volumes staying strong.
Posts tagged as “Forecast”
Global trade growth expectations have been successively downgraded over the past twelve months and year end 2023 numbers are likely to come out at about around 1%, according to December estimates prepared by the OECD. Long haul trade may even be solidly negative based on what we have been seeing for key trade generators such as China, the European Union, and the United States. Trade growth can only pick up if manufacturing activity does the same. The bulk of world trade consists in the movement of industrial inputs, intermediate and capital goods. As such global trade and industrial production are directly linked. Manufacturing has been weak all throughout 2023, but an improvement could take place in the second and third quarter of 2024.
Airfreight is primarily an industrial tool, with roughly three quarters of airfreight traffic linked to the various stages of production. Global manufacturing and airfreight tend to move in sync. Based on the outlook for manufacturing we expect US airfreight exports to decline by about 7% and imports to drop by about 3% in 2023.