The Chinese e-commerce sites ship the equivalent of 88 Boeing 777 freighters of cargo worldwide every day. The vast volume has sent air freight rates through the roof, but the two companies have been willing to subsidize fast shipping as they grow globally — for now. By Cyrus Farivar , Forbes Staff N ine months ago, Niall van de Wouw, who tracks air freight shipments across the globe for logistics analytics company Xeneta, had never heard of Temu.
But seemingly overnight, the Chinese e-commerce site, along with another fast-growing competitor Shein, became so popular with American consumers that it spiked prices for fast shipping by airplane from China, creating a cargo crunch that’s altering global trade routes for an air freight industry scrambling to keep up. “Nobody saw it coming last year,” van de Wouw, Xeneta’s chief air freight officer, told Forbes . “Their volumes could be the same order of magnitude as the largest freight forwarder in the world.
Their volumes are crazy.” At the time, the company was only a year and a half old. “This is very unusual,” he said.
“I cannot recall one or two companies producing so much demand. That’s the scary bit about exponential growth.” Temu, which largely sells clothing and housewares, and Shein, which built its brand on fast-fashion and has since expanded to consumer electronics and kitchen items, are unlike other retailers in that they sell items made directly by no-name Chinese companies, rather than sellin.
