Supply chain & logistics Air or sea?
The majority of the world’s pharmaceuticals are transported by sea freight, owing to its substantially lower cost. The predominant reason for using air freight instead is urgency, but the waters became somewhat muddied during the pandemic, when there was an imperative to expedite the transport of a range of pharmaceutical and medical products that typically wouldn’t be considered urgent. As the urgency has reduced along with the death toll, are things set to return to normal, or will air freight continue to grow its share of the pharmaceutical supply chain? Kim Thomas learns more from Erik Agterhuis, ATP biotech supply chain expert; Manuel Zollondz, independent supply chain consultant; and Wim van der Schouw, senior logistics consultant.
D
uring the pandemic, everything changed. And nowhere was this more the case than in the pharmaceutical sector, which found itself having to develop and ship new products around the world with an unprecedented urgency. In non-pandemic times, far more pharmaceutical products are transported by sea than by air – 3.5m tonnes against 0.5m tonnes, according to the Seabury Group.
The main reason for this is cost: transporting a product by air is 10–15 times more expensive than transporting it by sea. Using sea freight also makes sense if you are transporting goods in bulk. There is far more capacity in a ship than in a passenger plane – the preferred option for about 70% of pharma goods sent by air. If you want to send large quantities of a generic product from, say, the US to Europe, then sea freight makes perfect sense.
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World Pharmaceutical Frontiers /
www.worldpharmaceuticals.net
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