Tapping Africa's Freight Potential

Swissport Tanzania has inaugurated its new import cargo facility at Julius Nyerere International Airport in Dar es Salaam last year. The logistics specialist sees a lot of opportunities in Africa’s air freight sector amidst the ongoing economic slowdown. In conversation with Twinkle Sahita, MRISHO YASSIN, Chief Executive Officer, Swissport Tanzania, speaks about the latest developments of the company and its plans to exploit the potential air freight market in Africa. Edited Excerpts.

How has the year 2016 been for Swissport Tanzania? 

The year has been quite good; 2016 was very good for Swissport Tanzania. In Tanzania, we are not only doing cargo services but we also do ground handling business as well and ground handling business was quite good on our side. Cargo was a bit of a challenge because we observed reduction in volume for various reasons. I think around the globe the volumes were quite low especially in Africa but on the other hand in Tanzania, we had a change of government regime and they are actually putting pressure on compliance in the tax payment. Because of that we feel like some of the traders have stopped importing. And our cargo business mostly depends on imports rather than exports. Exports didn’t actually do well; so because of that we saw a bit of slowdown in volume and that of course impacted both in terms of revenue and volume. But as I said before ground handling business performed quite well and the gap we had in cargo was covered by the good performance of ground handling.

Could you tell us about your cargo facility at Julius Nyerere International Airport that was launched last year? What are some of the commodities handled in major volume?