Air cargo broker and Neutral Air Partner member Aero Africa has opened an office in Shanghai in order to provide a centralized customer service and solutions centre for its partners and clients.

According to Aero Africa, the new office will be responsible for signing local and independent CSAs in the Asian region, as well as assisting them in promoting its African final-mile logistics solutions and gateway cargo services. The new office is managed by Eric Dong, who has extensive experience in the Chinese air freight market.

The company launched neutral scheduled consolidations with competitive air freight wholesale rates from major Chinese gateways to Johannesburg, Cape Town, Nairobi and Lagos earlier this year.

“In partnership with 20 carriers, we offer logistics companies exclusive scheduled cargo services and maindeck solutions from our gateways in EU, UAE, JNB, NBO to more than 60 difficult-to-reach destinations in Africa,” said Juergen Anwander, director of business development and compliance at Aero Africa. “Our main focus is on transit cargo from Asia and the Americas, as these markets historically have lack of space on the first sector, limited maindeck capacity directly into Africa and much higher end-to-end rates as a direct through MAWB to Africa.”

He added that the company will offer its sea-air solutions this year for Asia-Africa traffic via Jebel Ali, Mombasa and Durban, as well as express and time-critical solutions. Aero Africa will also be extending its airline brokerage solutions to include new carriers and new scheduled consolidation origins.

Aero Africa’s network covers 84 airports in 54 countries and offers bespoke cost-effective solutions for the African market.

“This includes freight collect, A2D, DDP, neutral break-bulk, time-critical, project air cargo, as well as final-mile solutions including services to remote difficult-to-reach destinations in Africa, all through Aero Africa’s single point of contact, control and management,” said Jamie Anderson, director of African solutions at Aero Africa. “We have also developed a customized e-platform destination profile note for each country/airport in Africa which also includes hard-to-reach remote destinations in Africa and is exclusively available to our freight forwarding, consolidators and airline clients alike.”