Malaysia Airlines Cargo (MASkargo) is pinning its hopes on further discounts to woo freight forwarders to increase their transhipment volumes through MASkargo’s Advanced Cargo Centre at Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA).
MASkargo managing director, Shahari Sulaiman, said earlier rebates on terminal charges for cargo transhipped via Malaysia Airlines had been increased to 100 per cent for air-to-air, land/rail-toair, and sea-to-air transhipments from April 10 to September.
“With this initiative, we hope that freight forwarders would be able to increase their transhipment volume. A five per cent month-on-month volume increase is already good,” Shahari said, according to a Star online report.
Transhipment cargo constitutes about 60 per cent of the total volume handled by MASkargo at KLIA and amounted to nearly 353,000 tonnes out of a total cargo volume of 623,314 tonnes at Malaysia’s main airport last year.
In a bid to cope with the 28 per cent free fall in total cargo volumes in January and February, year-on-year and close to a 50 per cent plummet for the same period in Penang, where the semiconductor and contract electronics manufacturing sectors were especially hard hit by the global recession, the carrier has also moved to aggressively slash capacity.
Overall the carrier has reduced its freighter capacity by 30 per cent while the belly capacity shrank by seven per cent as the passenger network was reconfi gured due to falling demand.
“Pudong used to be our biggest station in terms of volume. However, due to the economic situation, we have to make some adjustments. We will start to pump in more capacity once the economy is back on track as China is expected to be the first country to recover from the crisis. We expect to benefit from this due to our large exposure there,” he said.
MASkargo has reduced its China service cutting its flights out of Pudong International Airport, from nine to just four flights a week.
“This is better than maintaining our previous capacity with ad hoc cancellations that will hurt our product branding and customers,” he said.
He added that any excess capacity would be channelled to the charter business, with its A300 freighter shifted from intra-Asian trade to do charters out of the Middle East, where it already has a B747 operating charters.
Shahari said he believes the cargo freefall has bottomed out with signs of a slow recovery beginning, but added it would take, “at least two years to return to our pre-economic crisis level.”
In the meantime, MASkargo will look to tap new high volume markets with plans to introduce new services to Lagos, Malmo and Colombo.
