According to DHL CEO Tobias Meyer, the effects of the Houthi attacks on merchant ships in the Red Sea and the resulting problems for sea freight have not yet led to bottlenecks in air freight.

Air freight capacities are sufficiently available at DHL, he told the Reuters news agency in Davos in an interview published on Thursday. Logistics companies had reported an increase in demand for air freight in light of the attacks in the Red Sea.

One of the world's most important shipping routes connecting Asia and Europe runs through the Red Sea. Due to the repeated attacks by the Houthis on cargo ships, many shipping companies such as Hapag-Lloyd and Danish rival Maersk are avoiding the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, through which around 15 percent of global trade passes. Instead, the freighters take the route around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa. This means that a journey now takes between 40 and 50 days instead of around 35 days. Some customers are therefore increasingly shifting urgent goods to aircraft, logistics companies had explained.

According to Meyer, the fact that the crisis in the Red Sea is not leading to major disruptions is also due to the restrained development of global trade. The global economy is "not really pumping yet", he said. This is also a consequence of inflation and high interest rates, which are depressing consumer sentiment. However, this could change: "The market's expectations with regard to interest rate developments are already assuming that something will happen in the second half of the year (...) this gives us hope that we will pick up a bit of momentum in the first half of the year."

However, online retail is growing again, said Meyer. During the coronavirus pandemic, business with online customers had grown rapidly and the major logistics groups had recorded record growth. After the pandemic, business returned to normal, and DHL also felt the effects. That is changing: "We are relatively robustly back on the long-term development curve."

(Edited by Matthias Inverardi, edited by Myria Mildenberger. If you have any questions, please contact our editorial team at berlin.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for politics and the economy) or frankfurt.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for companies and markets).

- by Victoria Waldersee