News / Air cargo market 2025: A year of front-loading, fragmentation, and forced agility

4 © Luo Yi |

If 2025 had a single defining theme for air cargo, it was uncertainty, and the industry’s accelerating ability to adapt to it. It wasn’t a bad year – but it was tough.

The year began with airfreight still buoyed by the after-effects of 2024’s ecommerce boom and geopolitical disruption, but cracks were already visible. In the first quarter, The Loadstar’s coverage showed a market increasingly driven by front-loading ahead of anticipated US tariffs, particularly on the transpacific. Rates and volumes surged sporadically, masking weakening underlying demand and setting the tone for what would become an erratic year.

By February and March, forwarders and airlines were already questioning the sustainability of volumes. Ecommerce remained the dominant driver, but its influence was distorting normal seasonality, with China-US flows swinging sharply week to week. Carriers added capacity cautiously, aware that any upside could evaporate with a policy announcement, or even a tweet.

That caution proved well-founded. As spring progressed, it became clear that much of the early-year strength had been borrowed from the future. By April and May, transpacific demand softened markedly, ecommerce began to retreat, and rates slipped. The industry’s focus shifted from chasing yield to finding somewhere – anywhere – to deploy capacity. Airlines experimented with new routings, while forwarders warned that margins, not volumes, were becoming the real problem.

By early summer, the market had turned decidedly dull. Front-loading had ended, inventories were opaque, and global rates flattened. Passenger belly capacity returned aggressively with summer schedules, compounding the pressure. As one forwarder put it, aircraft still needed to fly, even if demand no longer justified it.

From June onwards, the picture fragmented further. The collapse of de minimis exemptions for Chinese goods entering the US reshaped trade flows almost overnight. Transpacific freighter capacity fell sharply, but instead of disappearing, volumes re-routed. Asia-Europe, intra-Asia, Latin America and the Middle East absorbed displaced capacity, reinforcing a defining characteristic of 2025: air freight did not shrink –  it redistributed.

Geopolitics added further volatility. Middle East airspace closures in June caused abrupt capacity losses and global knock-on effects, while later in the year typhoons, Golden Week factory shutdowns and China-Europe rail disruptions triggered short, sharp rate spikes. None, however, evolved into a sustained peak.

Throughout the second half, the industry searched in vain for a traditional high season. Peak-season surcharges never truly materialised. Even when rates rose, driven by AI servers, semiconductors, pharma, aluminium shortages or brief tariff scares, they did so unevenly and temporarily. Ecommerce, once air cargo’s growth engine, became both more regulated and more geographically dispersed, shifting increasingly toward Europe, South-east Asia and emerging markets.

Volumes, however, proved more resilient than sentiment suggested. Data through late summer and autumn showed steady year-on-year growth, particularly in general cargo, hi-tech and vulnerable goods. What suffered was yield. With capacity expanding faster than demand, margins were squeezed across the forwarding sector, prompting large players to cut low-yield business and refocus on complex, higher-value verticals.

By Q4, the industry had largely accepted that 2025 would not deliver a classic peak. Instead, it delivered something more subtle: continuous adjustment. Asia-Europe emerged as the year’s relative outperformer, supported by ecommerce diversion and regulatory arbitrage, while intra-Asia benefited from production shifts under China-plus-one strategies. The transpacific remained volatile but functional, its mix changing rather than collapsing.

As December approached, rates and volumes surprised to the upside. Air cargo entered its 28th consecutive month of growth, helped by agile capacity redeployment and renewed ecommerce momentum outside the US. Yet visibility beyond year-end remained limited, with new aircraft deliveries looming and regulatory uncertainty unresolved.

In retrospect, 2025 was not a bad year for air cargo, but it was a hard one. Planning horizons shortened, historic patterns broke down, and success depended less on forecasting demand than on reacting faster than competitors. The industry proved once again that freight really does ‘move like water’.

The lingering question, as the year closed, was not whether air cargo could adapt – it clearly can – but whether that adaptability will be enough in 2026, as capacity continues to grow and certainty remains in short supply.