Air cargo makes a soft start to 2023 – decline across all regions except Latin America in Jan-2023

Historically, a downturn in air cargo business has presaged one in the passenger segment. CAPA wrote about such a possibility again, in Jun-2022, based on statistics published at the time.

So far it hasn't happened. Indeed, the reverse is true, with sustained COVID-19 recovery in the passenger segment in most parts of the world.

But IATA figures for Jan-2023 point to a continuing soft underbelly in the cargo business, with demand continuing to fall in most regions and capacity also falling in half of them. No region has anything to shout about, except perhaps Latin America, where both demand and supply have increased - but that amounts to little in the overall scheme of things.

The underlying issue globally is the uncertainty brought about by an amalgam of negative factors that rarely occur at the same time, like a flock of black swans landing on the global runway and refusing to move. Accordingly, we have entered an era where forecasting the future is subject to so many variables that guesswork carries the same degree of credibility.