The worldwide air cargo yield climbed to a level of $1.91 in February 2018, 1 per cent above January 2018, and 23.1 per cent higher than in February 2017, said WorldACD Market Data, a leader in GSA-performance research in a new report.
 
Given the aftermath of Chinese New Year (CNY, Feb 16, 2018), worldwide year-over-year (YoY) volume growth in February (+4.4 per cent) was way below the growth reported for January, resulting in a combined growth for the year's first two months of 6.95 per cent YoY: a good start of the year by any standard, it added.

The origins Asia Pacific and Americas grew more than average in these two months (+9.3 per cent and +8.4 per cent YoY respectively). Europe, Central & South America and Africa were the best destinations (+9.5 per cent, +8.5 per cent and +8.4 per cent YoY resp.).

Colombia, Ecuador and Kenya - in this order - are the world's flower growing powerhouses, together exporting about three-fourth of the world's airborne flowers. February brought the largest volume increase in flower exports from Ecuador (+11 per cent YoY), followed by Kenya (+9.2 per cent) and Colombia (+7.1 per cent). But the latter realised the largest YoY $-yield-increase (+14.6 per cent). More than 85 per cent of these exports went to the US and Western Europe.

 Worldwide yields rose by 19.9 per cent in US dollar and by 3.8 per cent in EUR in the first two months. The YoY oil price increase as well as the lower value of the US dollar, remain important elements in this comparison.

Strong pre-CNY demand caused Asia Pacific and Europe & North America markets to grow much more in February than in January, thus boosting the average yield worldwide. Thus, the lower YoY volume growth in February was certainly not caused by the abovementioned large markets.

The main reasons were (1) Asia Pacific as a destination showed a negative growth YoY, in particular to Hong Kong, Eastern China and Taiwan, and (2) the origin Europe, having shown a 12 per cent YoY increase in January fell back to a paltry 0.5 per cent YoY in February.Around 23 per cent of air cargo volume is sold via GSA's. This percentage has remained fairly stable over the past years. Not surprisingly, the percentage is much lower for the world's top-100 country-level O&D's (13 per cent) than for the smaller markets (27 per cent.

ECS, ATC Aviation Services, Air Logistics, Kales, Aviation Solutions, FlyUS, Worldwide GSA, Nordic GSA, ScanPartners and Global GSA figure in the world's latest top-10, accounting for 35 per cent of all GSA-business.

 They are mainly active in Europe and North America, where they take over 50 per cent of all GSA-business. As the GSA-market is much more fragmented in Asia Pacific and the Middle East & South Asia, they take only about 14 per cent resp. 19 per cent in those areas, whilst they are virtually non-existent in Africa and Central & South America.

The largest group of GSA's remains WFC (World Freight Company), with brands like Air Logistics, ATC, Kales and Hermes Aviation. Number 2(ECS) has lately been most active in acquisition. YoY volume growth for the top-10 in 2017 varied from 1 per cent to 54 per cent. In the Top-100 country pairs, in 2017 GSA's produced yields for their principals on average 12 per cent below the yields generated by airlines doing their own sales. In 2016, the gap was 10 per cent. – TradeArabia News Service