PHOTO
Germany-headquartered, tech-driven air cargo company, CargoCrew has accelerated its three-year strategy for its Dubai hub amid the regional conflict and logistics crisis, bringing forward investments in supply-chain resilience and operational flexibility, the group’s Founder and Chairman Hakan Ikizoglu said.
The company officially entered the UAE market in 2025, positioning Dubai as a gateway linking Europe, Asia and Africa.
Ikizoglu said the initial roadmap had assumed a relatively stable regional operating environment, with Dubai serving as a strategic transit corridor.
“What the current crisis has fundamentally altered is not our direction but our timeline,” he told Zawya Projects. “Capabilities originally designed to scale progressively resilience architecture, partner diversification, multimodal coordination, and real-time supply chain visibility have been pulled forward as immediate operational imperatives.”
He said the crisis has both reinforced Dubai’s strengths and exposed vulnerabilities.
“Dubai continues to offer world-class infrastructure, a geographic positioning that is genuinely irreplaceable, and an institutional agility that few global hubs can match,” he explained. “At the same time, the crisis has demonstrated that even the most capable hubs are not insulated from geopolitical shocks, airspace closures, or maritime disruption.”
Ikizoglu said Dubai’s long-term role as a logistics anchor remains intact, its long-term expansion commitments reflecting a clear and consistent strategic intent to remain a leading force in global logistics.
But resilience is now measured less by infrastructure alone and more by adaptability, routing redundancy and execution speed.
“The Europe–Asia–Africa corridor remains strategically compelling, but its effectiveness now depends more on routing redundancy, execution speed, and embedded optionality than at any prior point,” he said.
The CargoCrew chief said the current crisis is not merely stress-testing logistics networks - it is testing the fundamental viability of business models.
“Our response is unambiguous: build for agility, invest in visibility, deepen strategic partnerships, and maintain rigorous execution discipline,” he said.
Excerpts from the interview:
With disruptions to sea freight and regional corridors, are you seeing a surge in demand for air cargo capacity? How is CargoCrew managing the sudden volatility in air freight rates?
Demand for air cargo is rising but this is a selective surge, not a broad-based shift. Not all cargo can justify the economics of a sea-to-air transition. What is moving are high-value, time-sensitive, and supply-critical goods, particularly where maritime corridor reliability has been compromised.
The data reinforces this. Global cargo demand grew 11.2 percent year-on-year in early 2026, with the Middle East and Asia-Pacific leading that trajectory. Simultaneously, capacity constraints and elevated spot rates are compelling shippers to fundamentally reassess their routing frameworks.
CargoCrew's response has been deliberate: diversifying airline partnerships, managing procurement with discipline, and aligning pricing to lane-specific risk profiles rather than reacting to short-term market volatility.
Interest in sea-air and multimodal solutions is gaining meaningful traction but a permanent structural shift has not yet crystallised. Every crisis follows a predictable shipper behaviour curve: first, the market buys reliability; then speed; and only later, cost optimisation. We are witnessing that sequence in real time.
The critical pressure point today is not rate exposure, it is capacity certainty and transit-time confidence. That is where deep airline relationships and operational agility become decisive differentiators.
How does CargoCrew help clients optimise yields in a volatile pricing environment?
In volatile conditions, yield optimisation is not a function of chasing peak rates — it is about protecting margin quality while sustaining long-term customer trust.
CargoCrew approaches this through intelligent cargo segmentation: urgent versus deferrable, strategic versus transactional, dense versus volumetric, high-value versus price-sensitive. This framework enables superior allocation decisions and more disciplined, defensible pricing strategies.
Our focus remains on lane-level profitability, booking quality, and demand consistency not raw volume. When capacity tightens rapidly and rates fluctuate sharply, a clear understanding of cargo quality and timing becomes a genuine competitive advantage.
Yield management, in this context, is a strategic discipline not a commercial reflex. It is the science of matching the right cargo to the right capacity at the right moment, while preserving the flexibility to respond to rapidly evolving customer requirements.
How specifically does your digital platform ensure “real-time” reliability when regional airspace or ground logistics are changing rapidly?
"Real-time" is among the most overused terms in logistics. For CargoCrew, it has a precise meaning: closing the gap between disruption, decision, and execution as fast as operationally possible.
In an environment where airspace conditions, ground handling availability, and routing viability can shift within hours, the value of technology lies not in data collection alone, but in the speed and quality of the decisions it enables.
Our platform is architected around three core principles: end-to-end visibility, proactive exception management, and rapid escalation. By monitoring operational signals continuously across the supply chain, we enable early intervention before disruption reaches the customer.
In today's environment, reliability is not about the elimination of disruption. It is about minimising blind spots, compressing response times, and making high-quality decisions under sustained pressure. The ability to see earlier and act faster is no longer an advantage. It is a prerequisite.
Given the current geopolitical climate, which specific high-growth segments are you targeting? Could this crisis accelerate a more permanent rebalancing of global logistics toward air cargo for certain goods?
CargoCrew sees sustained and durable strength across pharmaceuticals, healthcare, perishables, critical industrial spares, high-value electronics, e-commerce fulfilment, and specialised or dangerous goods. These segments remain resilient because they are fundamentally anchored in urgency, value density, or supply continuity not discretionary demand.
Industry alignment on this is broad and consistent. High-value and time-sensitive goods continue to anchor global air cargo demand, and that dynamic is intensifying.
The current crisis may well accelerate a structural reconfiguration, but selectively. Air cargo will not displace ocean freight. However, for specific industries and product categories, reliability is now measurably outweighing lowest-cost routing as the primary decision variable.
For mission-critical goods, air is increasingly being integrated into planned, strategic logistics frameworks not deployed as an emergency fallback. That shift, even in its early stages, is commercially and structurally significant.
Are you seeing consolidation opportunities in the cargo services market?
CargoCrew's strategic orientation remains firmly asset-light and partnership-driven. In volatile, high-uncertainty markets, flexibility and scalability consistently generate more sustainable value than fixed asset ownership.
That said, crisis environments have a well-documented tendency to expose operational inefficiency and accelerate consolidation particularly among smaller operators facing compounded capital pressure and execution disruption.
We are actively monitoring the market and remain open to selective opportunities that meaningfully enhance network access or execution capability but only where there is rigorous strategic and economic alignment. We are not pursuing scale for the sake of footprint expansion.
What lessons does this crisis highlight about the fragility of global supply chains?
The most consequential lesson of this period is one that the industry has encountered before but has yet to fully internalise: efficiency alone is no longer sufficient.
For years, global supply chains were engineered for cost minimisation, lean inventory, and predictable flows. Successive disruptions from the pandemic to maritime crises to escalating geopolitical instability have exposed the structural fragility inherent in that model.
The second lesson is concentration risk. Supply chains built around singular routes, suppliers, or geographies carry embedded vulnerability that only becomes visible under stress.
The third is the gap between visibility and execution. Dashboards surface data — they do not resolve disruption. What companies require is operational optionality: multimodal flexibility, robust partner ecosystems, and decision-making frameworks capable of operating under pressure and at pace.
Disruption is no longer episodic. It is structural. And resilience is no longer a cost centre - it is a source of competitive advantage and commercial differentiation.
(Reporting by Anoop Menon; Editing by SA Kader)
Subscribe to our Projects' PULSE newsletter that brings you trustworthy news, updates and insights on project activities, developments, and partnerships across sectors in the Middle East and Africa.
