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UK NORTH WEST


Manchester Airport has big plans for its cargo terminal, says Stephanie Mullenger, business development director at owner Manchester Airport Group. “We are looking for a pre-let for a new 200,000sq ft freight shed, for which we have already obtained planning consent.” This was originally obtained for a potential customer who in the event withdrew, but the planning consent is still valid. The huge site would not necessarily have to be let to a single user – in fact, it’s rather unlikely that it would be, says Mullenger. It would dwarf the largest single facility in the Heathrow area of 80,000sq ft. Manchester’s new area will probably be a series of units, “although we will complete the necessary groundwork in one go because it’s more economical to do that.” The deal would add around


a fifth to the airport’s existing 1m sq ft of cargo space, one of the largest areas in the UK.


Stephanie Mullenger


Construction work, which will also involve moving a road, is expected to start in September 2011; a large quantity of newts will have to be relocated first before the earth- moving can begin. Further logistics development


could come as part of plans to turn Manchester into an ‘airport city’ along the lines of Schiphol, Changi or Frankfurt. Although


the development would include a host of other facilities like offices, manufacturing and hotels, logistics would be an integral part of this scheme, insists Mullenger. The airport has signed a deal to buy 30 acres from property company Burford Group on the outskirts of the airport, which would be combined with the adjacent city council-owned 30-acre Manchester Business Park to create the core of Airport City. “The idea is to make the airport more of a business destination,” continues Mullenger, who says that the airlines’ cutting back of their own office space requirements has created the opportunity to bring other users into the airport area. She points out that the Manchester airport area and the north-west generally has been a magnet for the freight forwarding industry, the list including KN which set up a 20,000sq ft centre in the region this year, Schenker, Ceva,


Menzies, Expeditors and Davies Turner.


Meanwhile, Manchester’s


cargo traffic is showing strong signs of a recovery after the 2009 dip. Monthly totals started to pick up on the previous- year months in May, initially to the tune of 30-35%, although September’s increase was more modest at 7.4%. Emirates currently heads the


official annual tonnage table at Manchester (though the offical figures exclude Cathay Pacific), with 17,800 tonnes in the 12 months to September 2010, followed at some distance by China Airlines (12,000t), Qatar (8,600t), Etihad (6,900t) and US Airways (5,000t). Cathay Pacific already operates


a near-daily freighter but a second, probably daily service, is due to start next summer, added airport spokesman John Greenway. With space and slots so limited at Heathrow, Manchester with its second runway is in a good position to


pick up traffic that doesn’t want to go to London. Mullenger adds that Manchester is targeting quarter of a million tonnes of cargo by 2015, compared with around 115,000t currently and pledges to improve communications between the airfreight community and the airport authority as part of that process. “We realise we are missing the bit in the middle, so we’ve appointed John Froggatt to be in charge of cargo strategy at Manchester Airport Group.”


ISSUE 4 2010 Manchester mulls Airport City scheme


Maintaining relations with the freight industry has become a bit more difficult over the years; in the old days, you could organise meetings of local agents and freight tenants but many Manchester cargo concerns are subsidiaries of large organisations with headquarters in other parts of the country or indeed other parts of the world. “I don’t think we’d exactly neglected cargo, but we hadn’t got quite the right skills set, and we realise we are missing a trick” is Mullenger’s assessment.


Independent spirit lives on


There aren’t too many genuinely independent airfreight forwarders in Manchester, but TQ Express is one of them. Still on-airport at Manchester’s World Cargo Centre, the company seems to have been remarkably unaffected by the recession, says director Martin Nolan. “As a small company, we’ve always had to be careful and plan for a rainy day, but fortunately that rainy day didn’t happen.” (Or at least, only in the literal sense; this is Manchester after all.) TQ Express may look like a small company, but in a sense it is


much larger, as it is the Manchester member of the International Freight Association (IFA). This is a global network of owner- managed smaller forwarders who have banded together and are hence able to offer similar geographic coverage to the multinationals, but with that all-important personal touch. IFA’s rule is ‘one member per city’ which helps maintain a degree of exclusivity; there are other UK members in London and Newcastle. Members are encouraged to work with each other, but it is not compulsory. TQ Express’s own customer base actually stretches from the


Scottish borders as far south as the East Midlands, but there is naturally a strong concentration in Lancashire, Merseyside and Greater Manchester. Manchester’s cargo centre appears to be getting a little busier


now. “You can tell how busy by the dwell times at the transit shed,” says Nolan. “If it’s a few minutes, it’s a sign the airport’s not very busy; if it stretches to hours, then it is.” Dwell times have in fact been creeping up, he says. “I wouldn’t like to say we’re in an economic recovery, but we’re certainly doing well and getting busier.” TQ Express has elected to stay on-airport, at least for the foreseeable future, though Nolan is conscious that rental costs are higher and there is no shortage of good quality off-airport office and warehouse accommodation in the area. “However, I feel that to provide the best service, I have to be able to handle my own cargo and being here means that I can make sure that everything runs smoothly.” TQ Express handles a lot of dangerous goods, along with


vehicles and ships’ spares. “The dangerous goods rules have got tighter and tighter over the years, but I’d like to think that we’re


quite good at it, and the airlines even ask us to repack goods for them from time to time.” There is still a major chemical industry in the North-west. “If you


pick up directory of the industry, you’ll find loads of companies in this area. But these days, there are a lot of allied suppliers in India and China, so there are a lot of chemicals going to and fro.” Sometimes TQ Express flies chemicals to distant airports and brings them straight back again – the manufacturers often want to know how well a new product stands up to transport. Sometimes a lorryload of soap powder gets driven around the countryside for the same reason. Manchester airport offers plenty of flight options to many


parts of the world, including several full-freighter services, Nolan continues. There is a nearly daily Cathay Pacific 747 freighter, China Airlines 747Fs and Lufthansa MD11Fs, for instance. Manchester is a cheaper airport for the airlines than Heathrow,


though not as cheap as Stansted, Nolan points out. “However, Manchester has a huge catchment area for industry, so yields are good. And you can still get slots here.” Then there are passenger flights operated by the likes of Emirates, Etihad and Singapore Airlines. In the global downturn, the airlines have preserved services to places like Manchester by combining formerly separate flights between the continent and their home hubs – so the Singapore Airlines flight from Manchester also stops at Munich, for instance. There have been some reductions. British Airways no longer operates any long-haul flights from Manchester, only the shuttles to London and some of the US carriers have downgraded to narrow-body types like the 757, which offer very little cargo space to the US west coast, and that only loose-loaded, not palletised. Some forwarders now in fact truck cargo from Manchester to Dublin and put it on Aer Lingus wide-body services to the US. But BA’s exit from the long-haul market has though opened up opportunities for other carriers. Some passenger planes also offer positively cavernous cargo capacity. Singapore Airlines 777 can carry 40 tonnes of cargo, more than many narrow-body pure freighters. Nolan adds: “We do use some services from Heathrow – but we do try to support services out of Manchester where we can.”


Manchester: a maritime gateway


Sharston, near Manchester is the UK base for one of the country’s leading seafreight consolidators, Cardinalmaritime.com. Now employing around 100 staff, in around a dozen years it has grown into one of the leading independent companies in its sector, offering export and import consols for the forwarding industry to and from major ports and cities of the world. Although there is a small airfreight division, the fact that Cardinal


is near the airport is largely coincidental. “We are here primarily because of the motorway network,” explains managing director Andrew Smithurst. “It’s very convenient both for staff and freight.” The company bought the premises three years ago and has largely rebuilt them. The improved premises have been good for staff morale, says Smithurst. Unlike the environs of most major European air hubs, the outskirts of Manchester airport are remarkably liveable, just a couple of miles away from Footballers’ Wives territory. Cardinal’s sister companies Direct Food Express and project forwarder Origin also share the site. It’s reasonably easy to get qualified staff, Smithurst adds, although


Cardinal is happy to train people from scratch if need be. “There is still quite a big freight industry in the city. Historically, a lot of the shipping lines had offices in the city (Hamburg Sud is still based there) and while most of them have moved away, there is still a lot of freight forwarding here.” Cardinalmaritime.com prides itself on the number of direct services


it offers. “For instance, in Asia we do Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Korea and Shanghai, all as direct services. And we’re also having a big push in the US; we already offer export services to New York and Heuston, but we’re looking to add the Midwest, Charlotte and North Carolina for instance. Business worldwide has certainly picked up in the last couple of years.” India is another growing area and the improvement in inland


transport services means that it is now possible to offer direct services to and from a number of inland points as well as the major ports. But China is perhaps the biggest market. “We’re unusual in that we


operate direct services into Shanghai rather than via Hong Kong.” Exports are still a major part of Cardinal’s business, and although


business comes from all over the country, the north-west is still a big manufacturing and exporting region.


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