high-tech


cautious. He pointed out that the company already has daily B747F flights linking both Shanghai and Hong Kong with its main European air hub in Liège. “Things are still too uncertain to make any hard calls on introducing additional direct air links into China but we will of course continue to watch the situation closely. At the moment, we are looking to develop our Chinese road network to feed traffic from western China into our established gateways rather than putting freighters directly into other Chinese airports.” Outside China, Schenker’s Kumar highlights the growing


production operations in new locations, both in that country and elsewhere in Asia – with resulting implications for international air freight/air express and other logistics service providers. In China, for example, there is a growing move to set


up new high-tech manufacturing facilities away from the traditional Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta regions in lower-cost centres further inland. That trend was recently highlighted by the decisions of Taiwanese high- tech OEM giant Foxconn, which to date has focused its production on the Shenzhen area, to develop major new facilities in Chengdu and Zhengzhou.


KEEPING PACE WITH DEMAND The speed and scale of the current high-tech manufacturing sector move into central and western regions of China is already prompting some observers to question whether there will be sufficient air freight capacity to keep pace with future demand. Schenker’s Kumar suggested there might be


a need to develop both additional direct air capacity into those regions and expand road feeder operations. “Current direct air freight capacity out of centres like Chengdu and Chongqing, for instance, will be insufficient in the future. More direct lift will be required. However, the hub concept, either developing one of those two points as a hub or even using a feeder service into a traditional air gateway like Shanghai or Hong Kong, would also be an option.” He added that from Schenker’s


perspective: “It is a bit premature for me to elaborate on specific solutions we might implement but we haven’t taken anything off the table.” TNT’s Oudenhuijzen is similarly


18 AIR LOGISTICSCHINA


importance of Vietnam as a location for the manufacture of both finished products and components such as semiconductors. However, the consensus view among air freight/air express industry executives is that high-tech sector manufacturers in Vietnam currently look less likely to experience air cargo capacity issues than those building up new operations in the developing regions of China. “High-tech customers started moving into Vietnam up


to three years ago but have only gradually pushed up their output there so air carriers have had a longer timeframe to prepare in terms of ramping up capacity,” Kumar reported.


TRADITIONAL CENTRES Elsewhere in the Asia region, Ceva’s Chee says that more traditional centres for high-tech manufacturing such as Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand are still “pretty important” generators of air freight traffic. “In fact, in recent years I think some production has probably switched back into South-East Asia as China’s production costs have gone up,” he suggested. “The other reason for high-tech manufacturers doing that is so they don’t have all their eggs in one basket.” A senior executive with Ocean World Lines (OWL), a


subsidiary of major North American freight transportation and logistics service group Pacer International, which recently opened a new office in Singapore to offer a single source for air/ocean cargo management and Asian regional distribution, highlights other factors helping to maintain that country’s importance as a generator of high-tech sector air freight traffic. “Singapore’s strong and stable economy,


sound government, good seaport and airport infrastructure, and extensive air and sea network


connections with the rest of the world, have encouraged high-tech companies such as Dell,


HP, Motorola and Nokia, just to name a few, to set up their distribution centres here for regional replenishment in the Asia Pacific region,” stated Alvin Lee, director of that Singapore office. “The types of high-tech product being shipped out include hard-disk drives, motherboards, integrated circuit boards, enterprise servers, storage devices and


finished goods such as computers, printers, phones and so on.”


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32