China's Air Freight Industry Booms Amidst Diversified Demands

China's Air Freight Industry Booms Amidst Diversified Demands

China's air freight market has demonstrated resilience and vitality in recent years, and continues to show robust growth in 2025. Despite facing multiple pressures such as geopolitical tensions, increased global tariffs, uncertainties in financial markets, and supply-demand imbalances, China's air freight industry is actively seizing opportunities, continuously enhancing capabilities, and maintaining its competitive edge.

The sustained recovery of the global economy and trade, coupled with the steady growth of the Chinese economy, have laid a solid foundation for the development of the domestic air freight industry. According to forecasts by the International Monetary Fund, global economic growth is expected to remain at 3.3% in 2025. Similarly, the United Nations predicts a 2.8% growth, while the World Trade Organization anticipates a 3% increase in global merchandise trade, up from 2.7% in 2024.

China's economic fundamentals are solid, and its development resilience is strong. With industrial growth and expanded domestic demand, more demand for air cargo transportation is expected to emerge. In terms of international cargo transportation, China's total import and export of goods reached 43.85 trillion yuan in 2024, with a year-on-year increase of 5%, and exports grew by 7.1%. Despite complex and volatile international conditions, China's international air freight market will continue to grow in 2025, driven by the optimization and upgrading of its import and export product structure, as well as the increasing trend of high-tech products and cross-border e-commerce exports.

However, the global supply chain landscape will continue to face significant changes in 2025 due to factors such as geopolitical tensions, tariff adjustments, tightened minimum threshold measures related to e-commerce, and an unstable foundation for global trade recovery. Therefore, China's air freight development also faces considerable pressure. The Civil Aviation Administration of China has pointed out that in 2025, civil aviation will accelerate the high-quality development of air freight from aspects such as cargo flight schedules, cargo aircraft scale, safeguard innovations, security check processes, and smart development. The target for industry cargo and mail transportation volume in 2025 is set at 9.5 million tons, an increase of 5.8% compared to 2024.

Cross-border e-commerce has become an important source of cargo for China's air freight. With the rapid development of cross-border e-commerce platforms and logistics enterprises overseas, the volume of cross-border e-commerce goods has grown rapidly. According to statistics from the General Administration of Customs, China's cross-border e-commerce import and export value reached 2.63 trillion yuan in 2024, a year-on-year increase of 10.8%. Cross-border e-commerce platforms have high requirements for logistics timeliness to improve customer satisfaction and platform competitiveness, making air freight the preferred mode of transportation for China's cross-border e-commerce platforms.

In addition, traditional high-value cargo such as electronics and accessories, machinery and equipment, aircraft parts, medical devices, vaccines, and perishable goods, which have higher freight rates and heavier weights than cross-border e-commerce goods, are also key areas of competition among major airlines and freight forwarders in 2025.

Meanwhile, with the smooth intermodal transportation among different transportation modes, China is striving to reduce total logistics costs and build a modern integrated transportation system. Cooperation between air freight and land, sea, and rail transportation is increasing, and competition is also intensifying. In particular, due to factors such as political instability, the crisis in the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, and strikes by port workers on the East Coast of the United States and the Gulf of Mexico, global sea container capacity was tight in 2024, leading to increased freight rates and port congestion. This has prompted a shift from sea transportation to air transportation for a large volume of goods.

For air freight enterprises, their development depends on the increase in cargo capacity, the improvement of route networks, as well as the cooperation of base airports and support from local governments. Traditional cargo airlines such as China Cargo Airlines, Shanghai Airlines Cargo, and China Southern Cargo Airlines have significant advantages in providing cargo capacity due to their fleets of medium and long-haul cargo aircraft and a considerable number of passenger aircraft belly space operated by their parent companies.