AIR FREIGHT FORWARDING
The Sky’s the Limit
Air-freight forwarders move forward into a digital future
Air Freight Forwarding
Best Choice of Options from postfirstclass.com
Digital challengers can’t replace every step in the value chain, at least for now. But they will nonetheless transform it over time.
International freight forwarding is often a balancing act between time, cost and environmental concerns. That’s one of the reasons companies choose Yusen Logistics for cost effective, smooth delivery of their cargo. Like them, you can be confident that our strategic alliances around the globe give you the flexibility to choose from a range of air and ocean freight service options. Seamlessly tailored to your precise needs, complete with end-to-end visibility.
All products include:
- Door-to-door service with other options available
- Defined lead times
- Optional Cargo Insurance
- End-to-end visibility
- Optional Customs Brokerage
Air Freight Forwarding
From seas to skies, PFC is equipped to handle all of your freight forwarding needs.
Our flexible and diverse products, global reach & local knowledge, all delivered hassle-free by our Air Freight Experts.
- A range of time-specific options from economical routing to first flight out and even Same Day, delivering reliability at the speed you need
- Total flexibility over delivery choices (e.g. door-to-door, airport-to-airport) enables you to customize your Air Freight
- Preferential carrier access ensures your cargo receives transit time reliability, worldwide
- Over 7,000 Air Freight Experts in more than 190 countries ensuring smooth transit of your cargo
Think together
Partnership is an over-used word, but it does go some way to describing our customer-focused services. We strive to bring much more to the relationship than simply a means of reaching your customers across the world.
Nothing demonstrates this better than our culture of Gemba; sharing your perspective and your challenges while seeking creative solutions that meet the needs of today and enable the opportunities of tomorrow.
Lead Time Based Services
Where more than one factor comes into play, we can provide:
- Express – 1-2 days for urgent cargo
- Standard – 3-5 days, flexible choice
- Economy – 5-7 days, maximizing cost effectiveness
Special Services, Balancing Capacity, Speed and Cost
When lead time is the determining factor, you can choose from:
- Charter
- Our global partnerships mean we can arrange charter flights to where your cargo needs to be. And we can solve issues of capacity, oversized or heavy cargo
- Sea and Air
- Offering the combined benefits of cost effectiveness with faster lead times than ocean freight
- Air and Truck
- And where cargo needs to be transported quickly, to or from an inland destination, we can offer a combined air and truck service
Industry Solutions
Almost every industry sector has some special storage and handling requirements, and at Yusen Logistics we have the industry sector experience and global network to meet your needs, including:
- Cold Chain
- Temperature Control
- Perishable Commodities
- Small Package Service
- Sensitive Equipment
- Project cargo, whatever the weight or configuration
Air-tight solutions for freight that can’t wait.
What is an Air Freight Forwarder?
A type of freight forwarder who specializes in air cargo and who performs consolidation of consignments in its own name.
Forwarders are vital for international airlines.
Forwarders book cargo space on planes more than any other supply chain partner. According to the International Federation of Freight Forwarders Associations (FIATA), more than 80% of international air cargo activity can be attributed to forwarders.
When freight is tagged for air treatment, it’s usually because:
- It is of particularly high value or
- Its delivery is time-sensitive
And because time-sensitive stickers are slapped on cargo with increasing frequency as customer expectation for speedy delivery continues its upturn, cargo space in the air is a hotter commodity than ever before.
For many this would be a disruptive trend. At PFC we’re armed to combat it — we take things in stride.
When threatening supply chain hiccups have cropped up, PFC has provided emergency air charter service.
That’s just how we fly.
Industries that Benefit Most
Yet not all is well for air-freight forwarders and cargo airlines. Faster growth in belly capacities and modernized freighter fleets will subject general cargo to price pressures of up to 3 percent a year—in other words, revenues may be almost flat despite higher transport volumes. An even bigger question hanging over the business today is digitization. New technologies, such as advanced analytics and machine learning, can help companies automate some of their back-end and customer-facing processes and raise levels of utilization. But these technologies will also disrupt air-freight forwarding profoundly over time.
What Does the Team at PFC Offer?
Our air freight team offers a wide variety of services customized to your needs. Often, these include:
- Priority air transport
- Export and import consolidated air and direct-to-consignee transport;
- Worldwide charter and special transport;
- Door-to-airport delivery;
- Door-to-door delivery excluding duties/taxes (DDU);
- Door-to-door delivery including duties/taxes (DDP);
- Access to licensed and experienced in-house customs brokers for your import needs;
- Access to an extensive international freight forwarding network, with full A-Z services from origin to destination;
- Cargo insurance arrangements (with some restrictions based on item);
- Warehousing, distribution, fulfillment, cross-border e-commerce, and delivery services;
- Special air freight rates for bulk movements;
- Access to ocean and ground freight services tailored to your shipping needs.
No matter what you need to ship, the Packair team can help.
The specter of digitization
Traditional air-freight forwarders face increasing pressure to digitize from three sources: (1) digital forwarding specialists offering solutions for one or two elements of the value chain, (2) digital forwarders providing a range of transport services almost as wide as traditional forwarders do and a better customer experience at relatively low cost, and (3) carriers building and improving their digital channels to serve customers, especially smaller ones, directly (Exhibit 1).
Although digitization will change both supply and demand, the course of technological progress is harder to predict now than it was in past disruptions. Several future scenarios are conceivable, depending on the adoption rates of the technologies that influence the pace and extent of automation and collaboration, the substitution of flows from one form of transport to another, and the ability of 3-D printing to displace significant volumes of air-freight cargo flows.
Here we present one plausible scenario for 2030. In this future, air-freight forwarders will automate their operations significantly, digitizing much of their business model. They will collaborate extensively with adjacent value-chain partners—for instance, providers of intermodal services. 3-D printing won’t have a major effect on air-freight cargo. The role of intermediaries will contract, and consolidation will threaten many smaller forwarders that struggle to digitize. The more comprehensive digital forwarders will act as catalysts for the new technologies, but, increasingly, successful companies will be specialists, offering advanced data-based solutions. All surviving forwarders will be more digitized by 2025 than they are today, and by 2030 they will be very digitized indeed. The better they leverage these technologies to reduce their internal costs and improve the customer experience, the better their chances of keeping or extending their share of the profits.
Alternatives to Air Freight Forwarding
PFC’s services are not limited to air forwarding! We’ve provided a variety of shipping services for the past four decades, including:
- Ocean freight forwarding;
- Ground freight forwarding;
- Cargo insurance;
- Custom crating;
- Drayage services;
- Courier services;
- And more!