Dubai: Building the cargo city of tomorrow

Moving out

The story of DWC’s development starts for many local forwarders away from the 45-minute drive south of Dubai proper. “We were first in Jaffa, in the Jebel Ali Free Zone, then we opened an office in DXB, and then later on at DWC,” said Anton Grebener, business strategy support manager for Hellmann Worldwide Logistics. “Everything related to DWC is very straightforward because the guys are very supportive.”

While carriers and forwarders knew it was coming, the move to DWC from DXB still seemed abrupt: On March 9, 2014, Dubai Airports – operator of both DXB and DWC – issued a notice of new rules for freighters flying into the older of the two airports. “Effective 11 March, 2014,” the notice read, “no new freighters will be accepted at DXB.” It went on to say that it was implementing “a complete ban of all cargo operations [on freighters] at DXB.”

The magnitude of this pronouncement can’t be stressed enough. In the year prior to the decision, 2.44 million tonnes of cargo moved through DXB, making it one of the busiest cargo airports in the world – and one that was rapidly approaching its maximum capacity. DBX was the world’s sixth-busiest passenger airport in 2014, and the planes carrying those 70 million passengers also picked up and dropped off massive volumes of bellyhold cargo. Carriers could easily transfer cargo between freighters and the bellies of passenger planes, whether within their own fleets or with other airlines. But overnight that changed, with freighter aircraft required to operate at Dubai World Central, and suddenly transferring cargo between freighters and passenger aircraft required a 10-kilometer highway journey.

Consider Emirates, the world’s largest international cargo carrier (see the Freight 50 listings). In 2014, Emirates’ SkyCargo division derived 35 percent of its revenues from its freighter fleet, meaning that the carrier found itself in a race against time to prepare for the transition to a two-airport cargo operation in Dubai. And this is not a temporary problem. DXB’s passenger operations are to continue indefinitely, meaning that bellyhold freight operations at DXB will have to be permanently integrated with DWC’s freighter operations.

Companies that spoke to Air Cargo World were adamant that the transition to DWC has been smooth. While the expansion incurred costs, these forwarders and 3PLs see growing freight volumes as a worthwhile tradeoff. Road interconnectivity is key to minimizing time and costs for transfers of intermodal shipments between Jebel Ali Port and Dubai’s airports, or airfreight between the two airports.

“For now, the roads are very good, since the DWC Airport is not so busy,” said Grebener of Hellmann, which operates a temperature-controlled facility that needs quick connections not only to DXB but also to Jaffa, further down the street, where general cargo, mainly automotive parts, is stored. “And since not all the airlines operate here [at DWC], you have to send a lot of cargo to DXB,” added Grebener. Larger companies, or those whose operations precede DWC, are often straddling the two airports – and sometimes even the seaports as well.