There has been yet another shuffle in Australia\u2019s highly consolidated airfreight industry. TNT Express awarded what is expected to be a US$575 million, five-year contract to Virgin Australia for domestic cargo transport, a move which has prompted Virgin Australia to ACMI-lease three freighters, according to The Australian.
\nBeginning in July of this year, Virgin Australia will ferry TNT\u2019s freight on its domestic network, and on newly-leased freighters. Virgin Australia\u2019s network currently extends to 47 destinations within Australia and offers connectivity to 17 international destinations within the Virgin Group\u2019s network. In addition, the airline said it plans to ACMI-lease two BAe 146 aircraft, and an additional 737-300 aircraft, which will be operated on Virgin Australia\u2019s behalf.
\nThis comes as welcome news for the airline, which, in June 2015, lost its lucrative contract with Toll to Qantas \u2013 a deal that was the bread-and-butter of its cargo unit. The long-standing contract with Toll, which Virgin Australia had held since 2007, allowed the airline to take a hands-off approach to its freight business. Under the agreement, Toll handled its own cargo and utilized the belly space on Virgin Australia\u2019s domestic narrowbody aircraft for any freight that did not fit on Toll\u2019s own dedicated freighters. Given that Australia Post, Toll and TNT together command an 80 percent share of the freight delivery business in Australia, Virgin Australia relied heavily on Toll and previously saw no need for a stand-alone cargo business.
\nFollowing the loss of the Toll contract, Virgin Australia cited the need to work directly with customers and made the conscious decision to in-source its cargo operations with the launch of Virgin Cargo. In a statement given to the AFR Weekend, Merren McArthur, Virgin Australia\u2019s head of freight and regional operations, said, \u201cA lot of customers prefer to deal directly with the airlines.\u00a0We will obviously do what we always do, which is have competitive pricing.”
\nMcArthur\u2019s division took further steps to ink new deals with ground-handling providers, such as Menzies Aviation and Aerocare, to provide ground-handling services which were in the past performed directly by Toll.
\nVirgin expects its cargo unit to bring in between US$150 million and $200 million annually by the end of 2017.
\n\u00a0
\nSource: aircargoworld<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There has been yet another shuffle in Australia\u2019s highly consolidated airfreight industry. TNT Express awarded what is expected to be a US$575 million, five-year contract to Virgin Australia for domestic cargo transport, a move which has prompted Virgin Australia to ACMI-lease three freighters, according to The Australian. Beginning in July of this year, Virgin Australia[…]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1322,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49],"class_list":["post-1321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-airport-code"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.actlogistics.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.actlogistics.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.actlogistics.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.actlogistics.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.actlogistics.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.actlogistics.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1321\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.actlogistics.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.actlogistics.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.actlogistics.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.actlogistics.vn\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}