The Leading Air Freight Forwarders and Carriers from China to the USA

A small group of integrated carriers and specialist forwarders controls the great majority of China–USA air capacity. Understanding how each one is structured — and what it is actually good at — is the fastest way to pick the right partner.

Air freight capacity between China and the United States is concentrated. A small number of very large operators hold the aircraft, the allocations and the ground infrastructure, and most other forwarders book their space directly or indirectly through them. Four of them are described below.

UPS — United Parcel Service

UPS is the single largest capacity provider between China and the United States. It operates its own freighter aircraft out of Shanghai Pudong, Shenzhen Baoan and Hong Kong International, and while a large share of that lift carries its own express volume, UPS Airlines also sells airport-to-airport capacity on the open market for general cargo moving in both directions.

The UPS Shanghai international transit centre at Pudong is the largest air export customs supervision warehouse in Shanghai and the wider Yangtze Delta. It collects export freight for the whole region — Shanghai plus Jiangsu cities including Nanjing, Suzhou, Wuxi, Xuzhou, Zhenjiang, Yangzhou, Nantong, Taizhou, Huai'an, Yancheng, Lianyungang, Suqian and Changzhou; Zhejiang cities including Hangzhou, Ningbo, Jiaxing, Huzhou, Shaoxing, Taizhou, Jinhua, Wenzhou, Lishui, Quzhou and Zhoushan; and Anhui cities including Hefei, Chuzhou, Ma'anshan, Wuhu, Huainan, Tongling, Anqing, Chizhou and Xuancheng.

UPS Airlines' nonstop US destinations from Shanghai Pudong include San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York — covering the principal US gateways. In southern China UPS maintains forwarder operations in Shenzhen and Hong Kong. It has also built regional capacity further inland: on 8 October 2012 UPS opened a scheduled rotation from Zhengzhou Xinzheng International (CGO) via Seoul Incheon (ICN) to Anchorage (ANC) operated by Boeing 767-300 freighters, with five rotations a week each way.

What UPS is best at: volume and network reach. What to watch: most of its lift is committed to its own express product, so the airport-to-airport allocation available to forwarders is comparatively small; routings are not always fixed; and it stops accepting bookings when the peak season tightens, which delays freight that is already booked.

DHL — Sinotrans DHL (DHL-SINOTRANS)

DHL's Chinese joint venture, known in the market as Sinotrans DHL, is primarily an express operator between China and Africa, the Middle East, the USA, Europe, Latin America and Oceania. International air freight is its second-largest business line and has grown quickly; measured by China–USA export air tonnage, it has ranked among the very top forwarders in IATA's league table.

The services behind that ranking are the unglamorous ones: export and import document handling, cargo pickup and delivery, weighing, warehousing, sorting, consolidation and de-consolidation, load planning, outbound handling, ramp handling, stacking, information processing and cargo tracing, plus the commercial air freight agency business — solicitation, tendering, booking, warehousing, transhipment, container LCL and FCL handling, settlement of freight and miscellaneous charges, customs declaration, inspection and related short-haul transport and consulting services.

Sinotrans DHL's China headquarters sits inside the DHL hub at Shanghai Pudong. Because it is a joint venture with a large corporate customer base, smaller trading companies and buyers who want its air freight service generally need to sign a contract and post a deposit with their local branch — and if a consignment departs Shanghai Pudong and Guangzhou Baiyun on the same day, two separate contracts are required.

FedEx

FedEx is best known to the public as an express company, but its strongest business is international air freight. It is headquartered in Tennessee, and Memphis International Airport — its global hub — is the most famous air cargo airport in the world. Memphis is far from any seaport in a region with modest transport infrastructure, yet decades of FedEx investment turned it into the largest air cargo airport on earth and transformed the state economy. Several Chinese second-tier cities — Chengdu, Wuhan, Zhengzhou and Xi'an — have studied and copied that model.

FedEx's China–USA product is correspondingly strong: an owned fleet, a hub-and-spoke network built around its own aircraft, and the documentation and clearance machinery that comes with being an integrator rather than a pure airline.

GoodHope Freight

GoodHope International Logistics — trading as GoodHope Freight (China) Limited — is a specialist China–USA air freight forwarder. Founded in 2012 as a booking agent for China Shipping Container Lines, the company pivoted to China–USA air freight from 2013, when China Ocean Shipping merged with China Shipping, and used the global ocean network it had already built as the foundation for an air product.

In 2013 GoodHope concluded fixed-block agreements with UPS Airlines and Polar Air Cargo out of Hong Kong, lifting more than ten tonnes a day to Seattle and San Francisco with an average transit of one to three days and guaranteed space through the peak season.

In 2015 the company took a deliberate strategic decision: every non-US air lane — China to Europe, Africa, Oceania, Southeast Asia and Latin America — was exited, so that the whole operation could focus on China–USA air freight for clients and overseas agents. Working airport by airport, by early 2019 GoodHope held close working relationships with the airline cargo teams at Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Changsha, Xiamen, Ningbo, Hangzhou, Shanghai, Qingdao, Tianjin, Shenyang, Beijing, Xi'an, Yinchuan, Zhengzhou, Wuhan, Chongqing, Chengdu and Kunming, acting as an appointed agent for their USA routings.

What that means for a shipper: fixed weekly allocations on the main China–USA lanes, space protection through the peak season, and a team that prices and books only this lane.

How the market is changing

Cross-border e-commerce has changed the shape of demand. Where China–USA air freight was once dominated by full container equivalents moving between factories and distribution centres, growth now comes from small, frequent consignments — replenishment orders, marketplace restocks and direct-to-consumer parcels. That shift rewards forwarders that can consolidate small lots efficiently and hold space week after week, rather than those that only sell large blocks.