Continuing to gathermomentum
holm observing that there was a “sharp improvement in under- lying earnings” with a noticeable improvement in profitability, pri- marily as a result of the lower costs it has achieved. The airline intends to main-
S
tain the momentum on its Core SAS cost-saving strategy, it con- firmed, enabling it “to grow profitably in pace with themarket”. Dueholm continued: “By following through
on our Core SAS strategy with the same vigour as we have to date, SAS’s profitability will con- tinue to improve.” Some expansion is planned, however, to
exploit specific revenue-earning opportunities. SAS has said that it intends to open new inter- continental routes between Oslo and New York and between Copenhagen and Shanghai, for example (ACW, 25 October, p5). According to SAS Cargo’s CEO, Leif Ras-
mussen, these new routes could be very valuable to the carrier’s freight business.He is upbeat for other reasons, too, not the least of which is that
Logwin managed a huge project in October when it arranged to fly pipe systems for a heat exchange system, weighing a total of 360 tonnes, over a distance of 13,000km from Gothen- burg to Santiago de Chile. On behalf of a long- standing customer,
the
freight forwarder commis- sioned the Frankfurt office of broker Chapman Free- born to charter four AN-124 freighters,which carried the heavy-weight and outsized cargo to Chile. The bundles of pipes had been packed in
custom-made steel frames for transport, with every aircraft carrying a payload con- sisting of three elements each 21.1m long
he is seeing “very high load factors,most notably on intercontinental routes”. Plus, freight volumes have come back, with
SAS Cargo now carrying more freight than it had before the economic crisis – partly the result of Scandinavia’s industry and export businesses performing well. Cargo remains an “important contributor” to
SAS’s overall results, he insisted, despite the fact that the airline no longer operates any freighter capacity – one reason, Rasmussen observed, is because there is more total capacity available in the carrier’s passenger aircraft’s bellyholds now than there was before the airline’s last ded- icated freighter aircraft was handed back to the lease provider.
Logwin’s Gothenburg-Chile AN-124 charter
and weighing 30 tonnes. Loading was a precise
task, Logwin said, as two cranes lifted the compo- nents from flat-bed trucks into the aircraft. The AN-124s had to
refuel four times en route to their final destination – calling at Lisbon, Sal in the Cape Verde Islands, Recife and Rio de Janeiro before reaching Chile. Logwin’s partner in Scan- dinavia, Trust Forwarding,
was involved in the preparation for the move and had staff on site, together with Logwin employees from Germany and Chile as well as experts from Chapman Freeborn, to help load each freighter.
The Scandinavian region was not hit as hard asmuch of Europe by the global air freight slowdown and,moreover, it is now recovering quickly There are no plans to reintroduce any new
candinavian carrier SAS recently reported its third-quarter
with acting president and CEO John Due-
results,
freighter capacity, he confirmed, but “this way works fine”, Rasmussen reassured. What is not so appealing are the low rates
that SAS Cargo still faces for its freight services, he commented. For the future, as well as main- taining those high volumes and high load factors, he is very keen to work hard to raise those prices. In other news from SAS, the airline was
recently fined by the European Commission – along with a total of 10 other carriers – for anti- competition activities in its air freight-related operations. The carrier is most certainly not taking the
decision lying down, however, and immediately announced its intention to appeal the decision in the EuropeanUnion’s Court of First Instance –a process thatmay take some years. “We are highly disappointed and strongly
contest the considerable level of the fines, which we believe to be disproportionate to SAS Cargo’s
actions,” declared Mats Lönnkvist, chief legal officer at SAS. “We have fully co-operated with the Euro-
peanCommission during the entire investigation and, for slightly more than four years, we have disputed the European Commission’s view that SAS Cargo has been involved in a global cartel,” he added. “SAS takes competition rules with utmost
seriousness and we do not accept any transgres- sion,” Lönnkvist went on. He noted that SAS Cargo had “in the period
1999-2006 been involved in a few isolated cases that constituted violations of the company’s internal regulatory framework. “This is unacceptable and the few SAS Cargo
employees who were involved are no longer employed by SAS. “However,we adamantlymaintain that these
isolated incidents do not mean that SAS Cargo has been involved in a global cartel,” Lönnkvist concluded.
29 November 2010
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