#5: Cross-border e-commerce boom continues
This year, both China’s 11.11 and the Western seasonal shopping holidays broke peak-season records, raking in US$30.8 billion and US$24.2 billion in sales, respectively. To serve e-commerce operations, Alibaba’s logistics subsidiary, Cainiao, unveiled its investment to develop six “eHubs,” while Amazon has continued building up its own Amazon Air hub network.
Airfreight hubs are becoming increasingly important to e-commerce growth, as e-commerce giants, integrators and carriers are building up their package sorting and automation capabilities, along with extending networks in the hopes to capture a larger portion of the growing demand. We expect those trends to continue and accelerate in 2019.