You might think of air freight as an established, unchanging business. But consider the following:

‘Although some uncertainty surrounds the future of international trade flows, demand for air cargo has been set for change, above all, because shippers are redesigning their global production networks. These companies are now ready to take full advantage of advanced robotics: from a network of central manufacturing plants, they will ship semi-finished goods to locations near their end customers, where they will finish or customize these products. Their new networks will introduce automated warehouses, predictive shipping, and drones for deliveries.

Powerful forecasting algorithms will manage and monitor end-to-end performance in networks. All players in the supply chain will need very strong IT backbones to enable this new transparency and these big, continuous data flows.

‘In a world where data and connectivity are the keys to the kingdom, new entrants could easily disrupt an air-cargo sector that all too often clings to legacy technologies.

The disruption could well come from e-commerce players, with their strong datahandling capabilities. Consider the case of Amazon. Ten years ago, the company was known for shipping books and other kinds of media. Then it created an additional business by selling its spare computing capacity and eventually became the leading provider of computing power in the cloud, with a market share bigger than its nearest three competitors combined’ (Hausmann et al., 2017, p.1).

Using Ansoff’s typology, how would you assess the level of environmental change facing the air freight business? Does it face extrapolative or discontinuous change? Based on this assessment, what attitude should management in the air freight sector adopt?

What organization strategy should air freight organizations pursue?