Less Cargo, Higher Prices: Why Air Freight from China to Europe Is Getting More Expensive Right Now

As of 24 August 2026

Anyone booking air freight from China or Hong Kong to Europe these past few weeks is seeing something that defies the usual rules. Volumes on this lane have been falling for weeks. Prices are not falling with them. They are actually rising.

Less demand means more available capacity, and more available capacity pushes the price down. On the Asia-Europe lane, that equation no longer adds up.

A customs rule has taken an entire cargo type out of the market

Since 1 July, the EU has levied a charge of three euros per item on low-value consignments from third countries. Previously, these shipments were exempt from customs duty. The rule hits precisely the business that has been regarded as the growth engine of air freight in recent years: parcels ordered individually from a Chinese online retailer and flown individually to Europe.

Cross-border e-commerce accounted for just under 18 percent of total intercontinental air freight volume last year. The overwhelming majority of it came from China. E-commerce was therefore a load-bearing pillar of capacity utilisation.

Since 1 July, that pillar has buckled. Shipment volumes from China to Europe are well below the prior year, and from Hong Kong to Europe nearly a third lower.

For the airlines, this means: freighters that could previously be reliably filled with e-commerce parcels bound for Europe have lost their base load.

Why the free capacity isn’t pushing the price down

Here the trend parts ways with what many would expect. The capacity freed up by the loss of e-commerce has not simply remained as cheap space on the Europe lane. Three things are keeping the price up.

The first price factor is capacity itself. It hasn’t expanded; if anything, it has recently shrunk slightly. A freighter without a base load doesn’t sit permanently half-empty on the same lane, it gets redeployed to where cargo is waiting.

And that cargo currently lies mostly on the trans-Pacific route.

Data centres for artificial intelligence are being built at a pace that makes air freight indispensable as a mode of transport. Graphics processors, server racks, memory chips, networking equipment, cooling systems and power supplies travel from Taiwan, South Korea and Southeast Asia to North America.

These goods are expensive, often oversized, frequently export-controlled and almost always time-critical. A single fully populated server rack costs close to four million dollars. With cargo like this, the freight rate is a rounding item, and a missed deadline when commissioning a data centre can quickly cost millions.

That airlines are actively directing their capacity toward this business is not speculation. Korean Air reported 46 percent higher cargo revenue in the second quarter and attributes it to the worldwide wave of investment in AI infrastructure.

For the current year, the airline has explicitly announced that it will concentrate on high-value and heavy cargo: server racks, semiconductors, transformers for data centres.

With this cargo, an airline can command a rate that an online retailer, for whom every cent per shipment decides the margin, would never pay.

Whether this pull is already drawing freighters off the Europe lanes cannot be proven with the available figures. Measured capacity to Europe has held almost unchanged since early July. That free capacity is not reaching you as a price drop, by contrast, is measurable.

The second price factor is fuel. Jet fuel sits a good three-quarters above the prior-year level, and this surcharge alone already keeps rates up, quite apart from supply and demand. Whatever downward pressure the shrinking e-commerce business might generate, the fuel price offsets on the upside.

The third factor is the market itself. The initial shock after 1 July, a sharp volume collapse, has been absorbed. The market has adjusted to the new customs rule, and rates from China to Europe are firming again.

That is the movement you are seeing in your quotes right now: not a further-falling price, but one that is firming up and edging slightly higher.

The AI cargo isn’t sitting next to you on the plane

A misunderstanding follows from this chain. Many shippers assume their consignment is competing directly with AI hardware for space on the same aircraft, and that it comes off worse in the process.

That is not how it works. On a flight from Shanghai or Hong Kong to Frankfurt there are no server racks bound for an American data centre.

The displacement, where it exists, happens one level up, in the airline’s fleet planning. That is where it is decided how many freighters are deployed on a lane at all, and that decision falls in favour of the route with the better yield.

The cheap belly capacity that many industrial shippers took for granted for years was never a market price in its own right. It was a by-product of someone else carrying the flight economically. That someone was e-commerce, and it is now falling away.

The regional average is even less useful now as a planning figure

As long as capacity was plentiful, you could work with rough market figures. A glance at the rate level for Asia was enough to build a budget plan. That simplification no longer holds.

Asia can look balanced on average and at the same time be tight, expensive and subject to long lead times at individual departure airports.

• From Northeast Asia, that is Taiwan and South Korea, rates are climbing, because that is where semiconductor and server manufacturing sits.
• From Southeast Asia and from India they tend to ease off in the summer lull. Add the two together and you get a number that describes no single real departure airport.

For your planning, this means: the airport of origin now says more about price and availability than the region does. Two plants of the same corporation, one in Penang and one in Taipei, today operate in different markets, even if every market overview writes them into the same line.

A further effect comes into play that reaches beyond air freight. The chip shortage accompanying the data centre build-out affects more than server manufacturers. It also affects controllers, sensors and automation technology installed in entirely different industries.

Anyone in mechanical engineering or medical devices waiting for electronic assemblies feels the same bottleneck without ever having ordered a graphics processor.

For semiconductors and sensitive electronics there are separate handling and security requirements, which we address separately anyway under semiconductor logistics.

What this means for the fourth quarter

We do not expect a classic pre-Christmas peak on the Europe lanes. The peak of recent years was largely generated by e-commerce, and that portion is at least partly falling away. A pre-Christmas bottleneck in the sense of overbooked flights therefore becomes less likely. A quiet booking picture combined with firm prices is the more probable combination.

The biggest uncertainty right now is fuel. Prices have risen sharply, tensions in the Persian Gulf persist, and nobody has the faintest idea how this conflict can be brought to an end. Jet fuel is likely to remain significantly overpriced.

How long the data centre build-out will sustain the pace remains open. The notion that a chip shortage would, of all things, drive up the unit prices of smartphones, laptops and consumer electronics by eight to ten percent is anything but far-fetched. Numerous consumer tech products have already seen price increases in recent months. This could lead to falling sales and, in turn, to declining cargo for the air freight carriers.

For the iPhone launching next month, price increases of up to $300 are feared. The mark-up may not turn out quite that high. But for the Europe lanes, a drop in unit numbers would be a second blow, because those are precisely the product groups that count there.

We therefore regard the current constellation as stable, but not permanent. For the coming months, one simple principle holds:

From China and Hong Kong to Europe, the falling volume figures do not translate into falling prices.

The floor on rates has been reached; from China they are edging up again.