The dense air cargo routes between China and Europe outline the beautiful arc of the “Air Silk Road”. Affected by the new crown epidemic, many European countries have closed “non-essential” physical stores. For a time, online shopping from China became a new consumer fashion.
Liege Airport in southern Belgium is the largest airport in terms of cargo throughput and one of the important air cargo hubs in Europe. Benefiting from the dividends brought by the construction of the “One Belt and One Road”, Liege Airport has continued to expand its business in recent years, with a good momentum of development, which has also brought close connections between Chinese and European small and medium enterprises.
In an interview with Belgian media, Liege Airport CEO Luke Paldon said that the rapid development of e-commerce is not only beneficial to the aviation industry, but also to other industries, not only to China, but also to the world.
Seeing the business opportunities brought about by the strong development of cross-border e-commerce, Yang Kaijing, who has been engaged in the catering industry at Liege Airport for many years, joined the logistics industry this year. Although his logistics company has just started, this year’s “Double Eleven” is still too busy. He said that online shopping has a bright future in Europe and the company will focus on helping European small and medium-sized enterprises export to China in the future.
In recent years, the construction of the “Air Silk Road” has yielded fruitful results. The network of freight routes between China and Europe has become denser and the structure of cargo sources has been optimized. This has helped more and more cross-border e-commerce companies to “fly” into a new world. Focusing on the new platform for aviation economic cooperation, China-EU cross-border e-commerce has worked closely to jointly pave the “road to prosperity in the air.”
Zhou Lihong, president of the EU-China Chamber of Commerce, believes that the “Air Silk Road” can achieve coordinated development through the rapid formation of point-to-point trade exchanges.
According to data from the Civil Aviation Administration of China, China has signed intergovernmental air transport agreements with 96 countries and regions along the “Belt and Road” to build an air bridge for the “Belt and Road” cooperation.
This year, during the sudden epidemic, the China-Europe “Aerial Silk Road” assumed the important task of “The Road to Life in the Air”. 300,000 masks arrived in Belgium by air, and more than 2.5 million yuan of anti-epidemic materials arrived in Luxembourg… China’s aid materials arrived in European countries smoothly and in time.
Since the outbreak of the epidemic, cross-border transportation capacity in many European countries has been limited, and Liege Airport has maintained efficient operation and has become a European anti-epidemic rescue center. The Liege hub of the “World Electronic Trade Platform” jointly established by Alibaba Group and the Belgian government effectively guarantees the logistics channels between China and Belgium, and enables efficient transportation of a large number of anti-epidemic materials, helping European countries severely affected by the epidemic to cope with the crisis. These routes and flights have become a vivid portrayal of the “Belt and Road” countries working together to fight the epidemic.
