When citing, Air freight already being the most expensive mode of logistics, he points out that when United States tariff increases are layered on top, the swings in cost and routing decisions become far sharper than they would be for cargo moving by sea or road.
Diversification is survival in unpredictable trading times
Turbulence Turned Into Pent-Up Demand
For Manish Malik, Managing Director, Logistics Plus India, the defining feature of the current moment is unpredictability, and air cargo is where that unpredictability bites hardest. When citing, Air freight already being the most expensive mode of logistics, he points out that when United States tariff increases are layered on top, the swings in cost and routing decisions become far sharper than they would be for cargo moving by sea or road. When asked how that tariff uncertainty is playing out on the ground, his reading is counterintuitive: rather than shrinking air cargo activity, it has driven a pent-up demand, as businesses rush to accumulate and hold cargo across geographies, tightening air freight inventory everywhere in the process.
Diversifying Beyond Core Freight
His response has been to diversify deliberately rather than lean harder into any single line of business exposed to air tariff swings. International transportation, air freight chief among it, remains core to the company and, in his words, always will be, but Logistics Plus has added a customs consultancy vertical that is performing well, expanded into setting up data centres for clients in India, and grown its warehousing, distribution and wide-gully delivery services for OEMs and IT companies, work that keeps the business steady even when air tariffs move unpredictably. “The situation is beyond the unprecedented,” he says, describing a need to be prepared for a new challenge daily rather than assuming any current arrangement will hold.
India’s Growth Story and Its Infrastructure Gap
On India’s broader position, Malik points to consistent year-on-year GDP growth as evidence the country is well placed within global trade, an economy he says few others are matching for pace, tempered by an infrastructure gap the sector still needs to close, he notes. Against that backdrop, he sees the widely cited ten-million-tonne air freight target as realistic and achievable soon, driven by economies actively looking at India as a manufacturing hub in a China-plus-one world that, in his view, has not gone away despite periodic predictions of its demise, and by an air cargo market that keeps finding demand even as tariffs shift beneath it.
