One year after it opened a new air hub in Shenzhen, UPS announced the completion of a series of air lane enhancements intended to improve service for customers throughout Asia. All told, the company has completed improvements to more than 100 intra-Asia lane pairs since it opened the Shenzhen hub last May.
The enhancements include faster transit times on key lanes between India and the rest of Asia and between South Korea and other Asian destinations. Also launching next month will be a direct weekly flight from Guam to Hong Kong, which in turn connects that U.S. territory to the rest of the world.
“The Shenzhen Asia Pacific hub has enabled us to strengthen our entire intra-Asia network,” says Derek Woodward, president of UPS’s Asia Pacific Region. “Since we relocated our intra-Asia hub to Shenzhen, we have operated more than 5,000 flights to and from this hub. We also have added significant capacity and service improvements to meet the growing needs of businesses to move intra-Asia express and freight volume. And we’re not done yet. The biggest winners here are our customers. Their goods either arrive earlier or they can enjoy later pick-up times to accommodate last-minute orders.”
Woodward says the new Guam flight will offer service to the express package, military and forwarder communities and provide capacity for the burgeoning Asia export market. “Additionally, the recently announced expansion of the U.S. Marine base on Guam is increasing requests for UPS services there,” he says.
UPS will initiate the Guam service using its largest aircraft, the B747-400 freighter, which offers customers 258,000 pounds of payload capacity and is suited for carrying both small packages and heavy freight required by Guam’s shipping and logistics community.
UPS says the addition of Guam to its Asia-Pacific portfolio is the latest step in the company’s aggressive expansion in that part of the world. Rapid growth in the UPS customer base there recently led the company to add new direct flights between Hong Kong and its European hub in Cologne, Germany, as well as frequencies into Incheon, South Korea and Tokyo’s Narita International Airport.
UPS says the Shenzhen Asia Pacific Hub, located at Shenzhen Baoan International Airport in China’s Pearl River Delta, represented an investment of $180 million and immediately slashed at least a day off shipment time-in-transit for customers in the region while offering a new level of service to the manufacturing region located just north of Shenzhen. The decision to move the intra-Asia hub to Shenzhen was prompted by developing trade flows that now see more than 75 percent of intra-Asia business originating from the North Asian region.
