Air Freight vs Sea freight

When shipping internationally which is better for your product, airfreight or ocean freight? While it greatly depends on the products being shipped and the margins involved, airfreight has been pushing its way out. In fact, airfreight is many times seen as a luxury. Not only have ocean freight rates been much more reasonable, but the timing of the ship window has been lowered with the coming of faster ships. Now in more recent years, with the world economy in a recession, global shipping companies have started to turn their backs on shipping via airfreight and lean towards the less costly ocean freight shipping. Even with the strong recovery numbers for airlines, the downturn percentages show that the percentage of recovery is much larger for ocean freight shipping companies than for airfreight shipping companies. Some people believe this has to do with the airfreight companies not coming together cohesively to determine trade lanes and balance shipments which makes for lopsided trade lanes. There
are also a lot of inconveniences and inefficiencies that should be addressed and the IATA is trying to help with that to better the airline industry. According to the IATA, more recently there has been talk of balancing out the trade lanes as well, but in reality, airfreight is costly. Right now people pay the additional costs only when in a time crunch or if their margins can handle it which is not as much as it used to be. This is really only good news for the ocean shipping companies who wind up with the freight instead. It is unfortunate for the airlines, but people are more apt than ever to ship via ocean rather than air.