Russia’s Sheremetyevo International Airport handled more than 134,000 tonnes of cargo and 15,000 tonnes of mail in the first six months of 2020, despite the restrictions on air travel due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Sheremetyevo Airport retains its leading position as the largest cargo handler of the Moscow air hub.
Moscow Cargo, the main cargo operator for Sheremetyevo, handled about 73 percent of the airport’s total cargo traffic, aggregating 103,884 tonnes of cargo and mail.
Freight traffic bound for Germany, China, Korea, USA and The Netherlands, Holland accounted for about half of the total and were the principal foreign cargo destinations, followed by Japan, Israel and Singapore.
The principal domestic cargo destinations were the far eastern cities of Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. Airports receiving the largest volume of export and transit cargo in the first quarter were Frankfurt (FRA), Shanghai (PVG), Vladivostok (VVO), Amsterdam (AMS), and Khabarovsk (KHV).
Airports receiving the largest volume of import and transit cargo in the first quarter were Shanghai (PVG), Frankfurt (FRA), Beijing (PEK), Hong Kong (HKG), and Chicago (ORD).
Sheremetyevo International Airport is the largest Russian airport in terms of passenger and freight traffic. In 2019, the airport served 49,933,000 passengers, an increase of 8.9 percent over 2018.
Moscow Cargo LLC is the main handling operator for Sheremetyevo International Airport, serving 72.5 percent of the airport’s cargo and postal turnover. Today, the Moscow Cargo terminal, with a total area of 42,300 sq.m and designed to handle 380,000 tonnes of cargo per year, is the largest in Russia, the CIS and Eastern Europe. In 2019, the Moscow Cargo terminal handled more than 275,000 tonnes of cargo and mail, an increase of 12 percent over the previous year, which was significantly higher than both the all-Russian indicators and the average indicators of the global air cargo market.
