JOC Staff | Jul 22, 2011 1:23PM EDT
DB Schenker said Friday it will shut down the U.S. domestic air cargo network operated for years by BAX Global, eliminating the last scheduled airline business in the country dedicated to the heavy freight market.
Germany-based DB Schenker, which brought the business and rebranded it DB Schenker USA, said it would operate in the United States entirely as a forwarder under “a non-fixed asset model.”
The company gave no date for the action, but said it will lay off about 700 workers at the airline’s Toledo, Ohio, hub and ground 20 aircraft DB Schenker has operated for its own shipper customers and as common carriage for forwarders.
“As a result of the prolonged recession and spiking fuel prices, more and more of our customers are opting for expedited ground-based solutions instead of domestic air freight, and they are looking for partners who can provide transportation management services rather than transactional transportation,” Heiner Murmann, CEO of parent Schenker, said in a statement.
Those transactional customers include forwarders that have used DBSchenker’s freighter capacity in North America, and they now will have to depend on passenger airline belly space and the spare wholesale capacity on FedEx and UPS aircraft.
