Swissport provides services for 850 airlines around the world. Photo / Supplied
Swissport provides services for 850 airlines around the world. Photo / Supplied
Swissport, at the front line of aviation’s near-collapse and now rapid rebuild, is forecasting a boom year in 2023.
The company is the biggest ground-handling firm in the world and its global chief executive Warwick Brady said the strong recovery showed no signs of slowing down.
Located at 285 airportsin 45 countries, Swissport has deep insight into the entire aviation system.
Next year could be “at least” back to 2019′s level because of continued pent-up demand, Brady believes. “All the planes are full, it’s going gangbusters.”
Around the world the company offers passenger services including check-in and lounge management and ramp services – aircraft loading, unloading and cleaning.
Swissport was restructured in 2020 when it was decimated by the pandemic, revenue collapsed and struggling Chinese conglomerate HNA Group sold out. Its workforce was cut from around 65,000 to 10,000 through a mix of staff cuts and furloughs in March of that year, according to the Financial Times.
Brady said the recovery in aviation in New Zealand could help fuel the economy, and the company was looking to almost double its workforce of 400 in this country.
Global CEO of Swissport Warwick Brady.
Photo / Supplied
It has a global workforce of more than 50,000 people and will hire another 17,000 or so staff next year.
“What we see is the whole aviation system under tremendous pressure. The challenge that we face is around labour and infrastructure.”
The Zurich-based Brady said the industry was surprised by the speed of the ramp-up.
Compared to most parts of the world, New Zealand was six months behind in opening up and this had allowed Swissport here to prepare for the surge in business.
It is the largest ground handler here with clients including Hawaiian, LATAM, Fiji Airways, Jetstar and a number of smaller regional operators.
Brady said there was a move by airlines to contract for more ground handling services, which was also fuelling Swissport’s expansion.
“Their capital is focused on flying the airplanes around – they’ve turned to us to manage a lot of their services that aren’t core to their business.”
Swissport’s wage bill makes up about 70 per cent of expenses and around the world they had gone up by up to 10 per cent on average.
“It’s obviously a challenge getting people in the door. Our customers need to pay a bit more – we can’t be the meat in the sandwich.”
In Britain, about 80 per cent of staff had less than 12 months’ experience. In New Zealand, it was about the same as those who lost jobs when the pandemic hit were now employed elsewhere.
Brady said governments around the world had been poor at consulting the aviation sector during the pandemic, causing the collapse to be deeper than it needed to be.
“There was a lot of political science rather than medical science around the application of restrictions.”
In the past year, Swissport provided airport ground services for about 97 million airline passengers (down from 265 million in 2019) and handled 5.1 million tonnes of air freight (up from 4.6 million tonnes) at more than 100 air cargo centres worldwide.
