automotive
unexpected additional air freight at short notice, including 80 tonnes of td.Flash (Lufthansa Cargo’s air express service) automotive components traffic to be moved between Detroit and Frankfurt. The business came as a pretty big surprise to us and the forwarder involved – the components had been slated to go ocean,” Gerke explained. She pointed out that while that situation had been a
“Hybrid cars, for example, essentially have two engines.
That does not mean they have twice the components but they do have a lot more high-tech parts, the sort of items which are suitable for movement by air. If you think of the batteries for electric or hybrid cars, for example, depending on the situation, they can be relatively difficult to move by ocean because they need to be kept under a certain temperature.” Meanwhile, in addition to general trends, one-off
situations are continuing to generate automotive industry demand for air freight services to resolve sudden and unexpected urgent supply chain issues. Donna Gerke, district manager Detroit, US, for German
carrier Lufthansa Cargo, cites a recent example when an industrial dispute closed the Canadian east coast sea port of Montreal for a week in mid-July. “That created a lot of
one-off, it is also now generally quite difficult to predict automotive industry demand for air freight capacity. The old days when automotive manufacturers had their regular component movements on a Wednesday and Saturday to be at their plants by Monday and Wednesday are over, she suggested. “Most of the automotive companies hope and believe
that all their components will move by ocean but then there is a surge in sales in a particular location, a port gets backed up or a shipping line pulls a vessel off a service and suddenly as an air carrier you are presented with a lot of freight you weren’t expecting,” Gerke commented. “So, I truly believe that current levels of automotive
industry demand for air freight capacity will continue but I also think there will not be a whole lot of predictability to that demand.”
24 AIR LOGISTICSCHINA
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