Cathay Pacific's new head of cargo, Tom Owens, said digitalisation and expanding partnerships will be the major focus of the carrier as it innovates itself through the pandemic and the peak season.
Speaking to the airline’s Cargo Clan publication, Owens shared his insights on how he sees Cathay’s cargo business moving forward as he maintained the Hong Kong carrier would continue with its ambition of becoming the "world’s most customer-centric airfreight provider."
"The main message is that we are continuing with our aim to become the world's most customer-centric air freight provider," Owens said. "That means our overall strategy and direction of travel remain. We must continue to be a customer-centric partner, but strive to be a better one by identifying the areas of our work that need to be accelerated and gaps that still need to be filled."
He said that in particular, digitization is a massive area of focus given the opportunity to make better-informed decisions when data is easily accessible and relatable.
"This will largely be based around digitisation and automation, using data to get to know you and your business requirements better, as well as improving our performance and service delivery," he added.
As an example of this, Owens said Cathay Pacific is "pressing on" with its next-generation, multi-dimensional track and trace, as well as using blockchain to manage our ULD resources better.
Owens noted that on the products side, Cathay has been doing good work to differentiate our specialist cargo solutions — but should now build on this further now and do so quickly.
"I would like us to be known by our customers as a cargo brand that can deal with challenging cargo shipments and move up the value chain in some of the products that we regularly lift," he said, explaining that Cathay's next-generation track and trace system will provide information so that the team can act quickly and proactively to anticipate or react to problems.
Meanwhile, the new Cathay cargo chief noted how partnerships with other airlines would play a key role as the coronavirus continue to impact demand.
"We need to build deeper relationships with existing partners and also look at working with new partners in other parts of the world like Africa and South America where we would like to be stronger,” he said.
He also noted that with the lack of wide-body aircraft predicted over the next few years, it is "timely" for the Hong Kong carrier to review its regional capacity needs with regional freighters or other ways to service customer requirements.
Owens also noted how the airline "will continue to be agile and versatile, particularly as capacity continues to be critical" during this challenging time for aviation.
To address this, he said Cathay have deployed its four Boeing 777 'preighters' to good effect, reopening airmail services to Australia and the UK, and we have also launched a temporary route from HCMC to Pittsburgh to keep vital trade lanes open.
“The long-term implications of the current crisis are unknown, but I would be surprised if international trade grows as fast in the short term as in the recent past. But it is a volatile world, and in cargo, things change pretty fast," he said.