After announcing 4 new routes in 19 July, TAC Index is adding the publication of two new outbound indices covering major markets from India to USA and Europe. John Peyton Burnett, managing director of TAC Index, said market indexation will add true ‘price discovery’ to concerned air cargo parties.

TAC Index data is mainly gathered from raw transactional freight forwarder rates, whilst supplemental airline data is used for quality control purposes, the company noted. A month ago, the company recently added four new routes in its index covering Vietnam and China to Europe and the Americas.

“Market indexation enables price and service to be disconnected and thus move the focus of negotiations away from price and more towards service levels,” Burnett said.

The work towards publishing outbound data sets from India has been brewing for several years, the company noted, with requests from pharma and other shipping companies. The new routes from India will include outbound lanes to USA and Europe.

“The Indian market is viewed by industry users as a spot market, and this has led to a lot of unproductive time and effort centered around recurrent price negotiations,” the company stated.

Burnett said that the company’s forwarder sources is beginning to grow dramatically, along with a rapidly growing group of airlines providing supplemental data sets. “We see air cargo market general efficiency growing substantially in the coming quarters as the TAC Suite of products begin to mature.”

“We are very pleased that our TAC Suite of products is now covering the majority of the most important international trade lanes, which is helping to bring much greater efficiency to air cargo pricing contracts, through the enablement of floating rate contracts, or ILAs,” Burnett added.