At Emirates, SkyCargo is a ‘way of life’ [VIDEO]

BUDAPEST — Emirates SkyCargo rode Dubai’s ascent as an economic powerhouse, consistently racking up double-digit growth in volume, and, over time, redirecting airfreight flows to make its dual hubs — Dubai World Central (DWC) and Dubai International Airport (DXB) — requisite links i global supply chains. In 2017, the second-largest cargo carrier by volume, Emirates SkyCargo can’t expect to keep posting those mid-2000s growth rates, when every percentage point adds up to millions of tonnes.

Instead, the Dubai-based carrier keeps growing its specialty cargo products, such as its cold-chain network, aiming for the multimillion-dollar pallets that don’t necessarily translate into high freight tonne kilometer figures, but go a lot further in padding out the bottom line.

Since opening an 11,000-square-meter SkyPharma extension at Emirate’s DXB last year, “we have received a tremendous response from the pharma industry,” sai Henrik Ambak, SkyCargo’s senior vice president of worldwide cargo operations. “We have actually seen something like a doubling in our pharma volumes.”

Ambak stressed that while it was one thing to achieve GDP certification, “where everybody rallies around this fantastci thing that we are going to do,” the real challenge was translating that into daily upholding of those same standards.

Below, Ambak talks about how GDP certifications impacted SkyCargo operations: