IATA has lowered its expectations for air cargo revenues and yields for 2023 due to growing capacity and a weak demand outlook. In its latest airline profitability report, the airline association predicted cargo revenues of $142.3bn this year, which is 31.3% down from last year and behind the $149.4bn that was previously expected. Meanwhile, cargo yields are expected to be 28.6% behind last year, worse than the 23% fall IATA predicted at the World Cargo Symposium in April.
“Yields will be negatively impacted by two factors: the ramping-up of passenger capacity which automatically increases available belly capacity for cargo and the potential negative effects on international trade of economic cooling measures introduced to fight inflation,” IATA said. However, the airline association also pointed out that both revenues and yields remained far above pre-Covid levels. Figures provided by the association show that cargo revenues stood at $100.8bn in 2019, $140.4bn in 2020, $210bn in 2021 and $207bn last year. And yield increases of 54.7% were recorded in 2020, 25.9% in 2021 and 7.4% in 2022. Meanwhile, cargo traffic in cargo tonne km terms is expected to decline by 3.8% on last year and by 5.5% compared with 2019.