Aero-Africa will focus on developing its products out of Europe, the United States and China into East Africa during the first quarter of the year, according to company CCO Jade da Costa.“We have established a hub at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, Kenya, from where we service various East African countries via our interline agreements with several local airlines in the region,” he told Freight News.Aero Africa has been eager to grow its footprint in East Africa, a region that is seeing an increasing number of innovative cyber solutions being developed.“We see a huge opportunity in e-commerce, in particular, continuing to grow in the African markets,” explained Da Costa. “This will also create a good opportunity for Johannesburg to hub as the transit point to various southern African and Indian Ocean Islands.”He said the company was still seeing volumes increasing due to the various block space agreements that it had taken out of Europe and China – a model Aero-Africa planned to emulate in the US and India during the first quarter of 2022.Da Costa said whilst the airfreight sector continued to see unprecedented demand amidst the ongoing Covid pandemic, it remained shrouded in uncertainty.“It is still very difficult to predict the current situation, with belly capacity still down. We do expect to see some normalisation in the market from April onwards and are hopeful to see more capacity return. With the current situation, not all carriers have returned to the South African route to Johannesburg. This, in turn, has dramatically increased the pricing for South African importers. There are also still shipping delays at dramatically increased pricing, leaving the importers with no choice but to import smaller quantities at premium rates.”
