Emirates sees rise in bulk cargo orders

With process equipments forming a major chunk of their exports and imports, telecom companies offer the biggest cargo charter orders to Emirates Airline (Emirates) in India.

The company sees a rise in charter cargo with growing number of bulk cargo orders in the country.

According to Emirates cargo manager (India and Nepal) Keki Patel, 8 per cent of the airline's cargo revenues come from India, which include cargo charter orders.

"India forms an important source of cargo revenue for us. With the launch of non-stop flights between Dubai and Ahmedabad, we hope to increase our cargo revenues from India in the coming months," Patel said.

Emirates does a cargo business of about 400 tonnes per month in India. Earlier, the airline used to run freighters only from Delhi and Chennai, apart from Mumbai through a tie-up with Korean Airlines.

From October 28, the company will add another 17-18 tonnes of cargo per day on the passenger flight from and to Ahmedabad.

"We get a huge chunk of process equipment as cargo from companies across verticals, of which telecom forms a bulk. The biggest cargo market from India is in Europe, followed by the United States, South East Asia, Africa and West Asia," senior vice president "" cargo revenue optimisation Pradeep Kumar said.

In financial year 2006-07, Emirates Airline earned a total revenue of $8.1 billion with a bottomline of $844 million and carried around 17.5 million passengers, apart from 1.2 million tonnes of cargo.

Kumar also added that 21 per cent of their revenue came from cargo, which is bound to grow given the bulk order of wide-bodied aircrafts including Airbus A380 and Boeing 777.