However, before you break out the Champagne, remember that neither January nor February data can be considered meaningful on their own. The timing of the Lunar New Year holiday in Asia can cause big shifts in traffic from January to February or vice versa, so, while the news from Lufthansa, Air France-KLM and IAG is certainly not bad, we will wait to see the February results before drawing any conclusions.

And regarding the Lunar New Year holiday, this year it fell in the second week of February. Whether this will have caused shippers to move extra freight in January remains to be seen. PACTL, the biggest handler at Shanghai’s Pudong Airport, said its January handle was up 6.0 percent over January 2015, to 125,000 tonnes, but it is so far the only one of the big Asian cargo players to report, so we will have to wait for a more complete picture to emerge.

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