Flying It For Pharma

The air cargo industry needs to up its game by ensuring reliability and safety across the supply chain to leverage the growth potential in pharma logistics

- Lakshmipriya Nair

The global pharmaceutical market is a rapidly expanding sphere. Reportedly, the demand for pharma products has doubled in the last decade and global sales in the sector are expected to reach $1.3 trillion in a few years. This, is turn, has accelerated the growth of the pharma logistics sector. A market research report from Technavio anticipate that this market will grow to $20.44 billion by 2021. Market analysts also predict that it will grow at a CAGR of 5.02 per cent during the period 2017-2021. This foretells a lot of growth potential for the logistics providers.

It’s no different for the air cargo industry. A report released by ICRA, in the latter part of 2017, forecasts that air cargo traffic in India is set to grow upto 60 per cent in the next five years to 4.7 million tonnes.

CRISIL Research also reveals that freight traffic at airports to grow by 11-13 per cent in FY2018, due to factors such as “expected revival in the global economy, domestic growth, increasing connectivity on account of air service agreements, and a booming e-commerce industry.”

Airways for pharma logistics

The pharma industry often depends on airways to carry high-value, time and temperature sensitive cargo, especially vaccines. As Vikas Khatri, Founder, Aviral Consulting explains, “Normally air cargo is used more in case of cross border, temperature sensitive pharma shipments. Only in cases of high value pharma shipments, which are highly time critical, air mode is used. Global potential of air freight for pharma shipments is substantially high, it’s almost three per cent of the air freight revenue of the aviation industry.”