S13.7 · Transportation, Logistics & Mobility
Air freight integrators and forwarders navigating a record 2024, with automation compressing forwarder margin more slowly than in trucking.
Global air cargo had a record 2024: cargo tonne-kilometers grew 11.3% for the year, with full-year yields still 39% above 2019 levels (IATA, January 2025). That is a segment moving in the opposite direction from the ground-freight recession hitting trucking over the same period — same macro, different cycle. No single precise global revenue figure exists for the segment as a whole, and the reason is structural: it spans owned-aircraft integrators, belly cargo on passenger carriers, and an asset-light forwarder layer, each with very different revenue recognition.
Two forces drove the 2024 growth: e-commerce cross-border volume originating in China, and a Red Sea-driven modal shift as shippers moved cargo from ocean to air to avoid Red Sea disruption to container routes. Asia-Pacific led growth at 14.5%. Demand concentrates on the Asia-Pacific, transpacific and Europe-Asia lanes; capacity concentrates among the integrators — FedEx, UPS, DHL — plus belly cargo capacity on passenger airlines, which fluctuates with passenger route networks rather than with cargo demand directly.
Beneath the integrators sits a fragmented layer of forwarders (Kuehne+Nagel, DSV, DHL Global Forwarding) who broker capacity rather than own aircraft. The economics are genuinely mixed rather than uniform: integrators are asset-heavy, owning aircraft and hub infrastructure, while forwarders are asset-light capacity brokers. The same asset-heavy/asset-light split runs through ground freight — the difference here is that it divides two tiers of a single segment rather than separate segments. Upstream, air cargo depends on aircraft manufacturers and airport infrastructure; downstream, it feeds forwarders and e-commerce and retail shippers directly.
Forwarder margin is where the money moves first. Capacity-matching and rate-quoting automation is compressing it through the same mechanism reshaping freight brokerage — displacing the human function of matching a shipment to available capacity and negotiating price. The compression is real but less acute than in ground freight brokerage, because forwarders retain two things a load-matching algorithm alone does not replicate: customs and regulatory compliance, and multimodal routing complexity. That partial moat slows the disruption timeline relative to brokerage. It does not exempt the segment from the same pressure.
Forwarders building direct carrier-capacity relationships are defending against a second, different threat: disintermediation by e-commerce platforms that book cargo capacity directly rather than through a forwarder at all. Both pressures — algorithmic margin compression and platform disintermediation — converge on the same 2-5 year horizon over which forwarder margin is expected to compress. The timeline is comparable to ground freight brokerage. The difference is that it arrives from two directions rather than one.