Mother nature helps push up airfreight rates

irfreight rates continued to rise last week as weather conditions, volcanic activity and wars put capacity under pressure.

The latest figures from TAC Index show that the overall Baltic Air Freight Index was up 4.6% in the week to November 20 compared with the previous seven days.

The increases were led by China as prices out of Hong Kong increased by 11.5% compared with a week earlier and are now down by 2.2% compared with a year ago.

Outbound Shanghai increased by 5.3% compared with a week earlier reducing its year-on-year decline to 1.3% “led by double-digit gains to Europe”.

“Rates from both Hong Kong and Shanghai to the US are now comfortably above where they were a year ago”, TAC said in its weekly round up.

“The overall rise was driven largely by some big moves out of China, with capacity seemingly impacted by various events including heavy snowfall in Anchorage, disrupting TransPacific traffic, plus volcanoes and earthquakes elsewhere in addition to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.”