World Air Cargo and Maritime Traffic
While maritime traffic growth has matched overall world air cargo growth in the past decade, international air cargo traffic continues to expand faster than the movement of goods by sea.
Air cargo is only one part of the global goods distribution network. Shippers demand that shipments arrive at their destination on time, undamaged, and at a reasonable price, regardless of transportation mode. Different transport modes (road, rail, maritime and air) often can move the same commodities, but for the intercontinental movement of freight, shippers usually have only two choices: air and maritime. Maritime transport offers the primary benefit of lower cost; air transport offers the benefit of speed.
The maritime industry, as measured in tonne-kilometers of goods transported, is much larger than the air cargo industry. In 2005, the world maritime industry generated a total of 53.4 trillion RTKs of traffic compared to 178.1 billion RTKs of traffic for the air cargo industry. However, this maritime traffic includes the movement of bulk commodities such as oil, metal ores, and grains, none of which can be directly compared to the higher-value dry commodities associated with transport by air. A better comparison of the air and maritime modes can be made using the remaining maritime dry cargo after these bulk commodities have been removed, which totaled about 16.2 trillion RTKs of traffic in year 2005.
Historically, world air cargo has outpaced maritime growth in these similar commodities, growing 6.4 percent per year from 1985 to 2005, whereas maritime grew substantially slower at 4.8 percent per year. In the past decade, however, maritime traffic has grown at a slightly faster pace than air cargo traffic, averaging 5.4 percent compared to 5.1 percent per year for total world air cargo. The recent surge in maritime transport is due primarily to the rapid growth in container ships (both in size and number), which have increased about 10 percent per year in overall capacity since the mid-1990s.
Although total world air cargo has averaged 5.1 percent growth for the past ten years, it should be noted that international air cargo traffic has grown nearly 6 percent per year during that time, faster than maritime traffic. Furthermore, international air cargo traffic should continue to outpace international maritime traffic growth owing to the growth of passenger airplane belly capacity, greater market access of freighter airplanes versus ships (e.g., nearly 600 airports worldwide can be accessed by large widebody freighters), and anticipated cost reductions in air transport overall.