Cargo growth continues for Fraport airports in January

The first month of 2018 shows promising growth in cargo throughput for many of Fraport’s airports – this in the wake of Fraport and IT service provider Dakosy’s announcement of an endeavor to implement a fully digital cargo portal at Frankfurt Airport (FRA).

FRA, Fraport’s biggest subsidiary, announced a modest increase of 1.3 percent in cargo throughput in January. FRA’s throughput growth is cause for a continued sense of optimism for the airport. A tepid year-over-year gain in October 2017 of 0.7 percent was cause for concern, but redeemed by a healthy 5 percent, y-o-y, increase in November 2017. European traffic accounted for a majority of the growth in January, rising by 12.6 percent, with intercontinental traffic rising by 2.6 percent, y-o-y.

Dakosy and Frankfurt’s cooperation will mark the world’s first full digitization of the dangerous goods handling process, according to Fraport. All shipment details and industry data at FRA will be transmitted electronically through an interface from shippers to airlines, which will theoretically expedite the process, promote transparency and allow any errors to be detected earlier in the process. The software is due to be fully implemented and launched in May of 2018.

Several other Fraport-operated airport also reported healthy increases in cargo volumes. Airports in Xian, Fortaleza, Hannover and Ljubljana all reported healthy airfreight increases of 14.7, 19.4, 17 and 18 percent, y-o-y, respectively, for the month. One significant outlier, however, was Burgas Airport in Bulgaria, which suffered a nearly 50 percent reduction in throughput last month, compared to January 2017.