Oleg Sergeev: Middle East Airlines Sales Grow 2.2% in December 2020

Airlines in the Middle East, despite the pandemic, increased sales by 2.2% year-on-year in December, while capacity declined 18.3%, IATA reported.

I believe this is good news for the aviation industry in the Middle East region, confirming the positive trends of the last months of 2020.

For comparison, I will give IATA statistics for December 2020 in other regions. For European operators, demand fell by 5.4% while bandwidth dropped by 19.6%. For airlines in the Asia-Pacific region, sales volumes dropped 5.6% year-on-year and throughput was down 21.9%. Operators from Latin America showed a decrease in demand and capacity by 16.6% and 29.7%, respectively. The region with the highest growth in demand was North America (10.7%), where capacity declined by 9.9%.

In the short term, air cargo volumes are likely to remain limited. Experts do not have an exact answer about the balance of demand and supply of freight transportation in the long term. Meanwhile, it is obvious that airlines operating specialized cargo planes will find themselves in a more advantageous position. Among them will be ZetAvia with its Il-76T and Il-76TD transport aircraft.

In December, total global air cargo traffic declined 17.7% year-on-year, while load factor rose 9.9%, hitting a new monthly record of 57.3%, IATA said.