Oleg Sergeev: UAE air cargo revenue explosives amid pandemic

Cargo revenues for a number of airlines are growing at a fantastic rate, despite the decline in transported tonnage.

For example, the Emirates SkyCargo group announced an increase in freight profitability by 88% and an increase in revenue by 53%, while tonnage decreased by 22%. This high freight profitability has provided more than half of the airline's total revenue, despite a significant reduction in traffic during the coronavirus. Due to the pandemic, this largest Emirati airline in more than 30 years of operation for the first time recorded an annual loss of $ 6 billion in financial results for 2020-2021.

It will be noted that airlines that specialize exclusively in cargo transportation did not have to rebuild their cargo network to meet high demand from shippers facing capacity shortages. ZetAvia, which operates charter flights to the countries of the Middle East, Europe and Africa on IL-76 cargo planes, also did without restructuring. These Russian cargo aircraft are well known to specialists for their reliability and unpretentiousness.

Having thirty years of experience in aviation, I want to emphasize that in these difficult times for the aviation industry, a stable workforce, a desire for innovation and investment in digital technologies are of particular importance. Hopefully the aviation industry will recover in the near future due to mass vaccination of the population, which will allow airlines to resume flights and finally return to pre-crisis levels. According to doctors, in order to end the pandemic, 60% of the world's population must be vaccinated.