The global air cargo industry broke traffic records in 2024. Cargo revenues are on the rise again and the trend is expected to continue in 2025
December confirmed the good health of air freight transport in 2024. Global tonne-kilometre traffic increased by 6.1% year-on-year, according to figures from the International Air Transport Association (IATA).
This is the 17th consecutive month of growth. On a month-on-month basis, the increase is limited to 0.9% in seasonally adjusted data, representing traffic of around 24.2 billion tonne-kilometre (t-km), according to our estimates.
On international routes, traffic increased by 7% . All major routes are progressing, with the exception of the Africa-Asia corridor, which is down 4% year-on-year. Intra-Asia traffic is leading the growth with an 11% increase, closely followed by the Europe-Asia corridor, which is recording its 22nd consecutive month of year-on-year growth with a 10.3% increase in December. The Asia-North America corridor, the world’s leading route in terms of volume, recorded an 8% year-on-year increase, its 14th consecutive month of expansion.
Total accumulated
Global air freight demand is expected to increase by 11.3% in 2024 compared to 2023, and by 12.2% on international routes.
The sector thus reaches a new all-time high, exceeding by 0.5% the volumes of the previous record reached in 2021, during the post-Covid recovery period. At that time, traffic amounted to some 275 billion tonne-kilometres.
The performance of the air freight sector is all the more remarkable when we consider that in 2024 , global freight trade grew by only 3.6%. The sector has benefited in particular from the strong growth of cross-border e-commerce, but also from a number of exogenous factors, starting with the disruptions to maritime transport in the Red Sea . The global air freight sector has thus recorded significantly higher growth than initially expected, with IATA forecasting a 17.3% drop in global freight turnover in December 2023, compared with a 4.5% increase in traffic.
