Top 4 observations from TIACA’s Air Cargo Forum

Scholte links belly space to slow pace of disruption

On Wednesday, TIACA chairman and Jan de Rijk Logistics CEO Sebastiaan Scholte spoke with Air Cargo World about the rapid changes occurring in the airfreight business. He also made an interesting point about what has not changed in air cargo.

“This may be a very bad statement,” he prefaced. “But, in the past, I said this is an industry waiting to be disrupted. In my company, Jan de Rijk, we are transforming more into a technology company, so we have smart algorithms, artificial intelligence – those [tools] are the future. But unfortunately, if this could have been disrupted, it would have been disrupted already, as an industry. That’s my personal opinion, but I’ve thought a lot about this.”

The reason for the slow pace of disruption is the unique predicament of vastly abundant belly cargo space. “It’s a strength, and a weakness, of this industry that there are so many passenger bellies out there, nobody – not Alibaba, not Amazon – nobody can replicate that. And the cost of operating that is very minimal.” With thousands and thousands of frequencies every day, he added, it’s very hard for the industry to come up with innovative ideas than can compete economically with the abundance of belly capacity.

Of course, there are a few new improvements Scholte could point to – namely TIACA’s new Cargo Service Quality (CSQ) tool, which he described as the equivalent of a “Trip Advisor” of the cargo industry, providing user-based quality benchmarks for air cargo services. “Why not value your suppliers as well as your customers? Why not allow the airlines to evaluate forwarding services?” he said. “We started first with the forwarders evaluating the cargo terminals, mainly in Asia. And we’re trying to roll it out to the rest of the industry.”