2017 will be another year of change, challenge and evolution. Our industry will be affected on both the regulatory and business fronts.
From a regulatory perspective, while we have made great progress in developing collaborative security programs, accomplished by industry associations working closely together both locally and globally, we will likely see more attention to enforcement of programs. We’ve already seen the beginnings of this movement. As we have distributed more responsibility for security across the entire supply chain, the compliance arms of the regulatory bodies will be expanding their inspection activities and regimes, to ensure what has been designed and regulated is fully implemented and in effect.
From a business perspective, I believe we will see more consolidation in all areas. The global economy still presents a challenge to growth, which will likely not help in the struggle to keep yields moving along any general growth curve. We may especially see this have an affect among ground handlers, who have difficulty overcoming fixed costs to provide the desired service, with current handling rates in the market. It’s not likely that many carriers will return to “in-house” services, so this certainly is a difficult equation to solve.
Overall, I am optimistic that these are not insurmountable issues, and I am confident that our industry will rise to the challenge as it always has.