From Baku to Singapore: Azerbaijan expands its global air cargo reach Article by UK media

The British newspaper Air Cargo Week has published an article highlighting Azerbaijan's growing role as an international air cargo hub. Caliber.Az presents key excerpts from the piece for its readers.

"When Silk Way West Airlines signed a new multi-year cargo and freighter handling agreement with dnata at Singapore Changi Airport, the headlines largely wrote themselves. A well-known handler, a fast-growing freighter airline, a major hub. Tick, tick, tick. But spend a little more time with this deal and it starts to look like something bigger than a ground handling contract. It starts to look like the opening of a new chapter in how cargo moves between Central Asia and South-East Asia.

Under the agreement, dnata will support Silk Way West’s twice-weekly freighter services at Changi, handling more than 15,000 tons of cargo annually. That covers the full spread, general freight, temperature-sensitive goods, oil and gas equipment, aviation parts, and aerospace cargo.

For dnata, the numbers in Singapore speak for themselves. The handler supports over 30 airline customers at Changi, processes around 250,000 tons of cargo each year, manages approximately 22,000 flights annually and employs more than 1,500 people at the airport. Adding Silk Way West to that roster at one of Asia’s most important freight hubs is consistent, not surprising.

Baku as the bridge

Silk Way West is not your typical cargo airline. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Baku, it has spent the better part of a decade positioning Azerbaijan not just as a place of origin or destination, but as a transit point. A physical bridge between Asia and Europe that happens to sit at the crossroads of the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, otherwise known as the Middle Corridor. That route, running from China across Kazakhstan, over the Caspian Sea, through Azerbaijan and Georgia to Türkiye and Europe, has gone from a geopolitical curiosity to one of the most talked-about trade corridors in the world, accelerated first by the war in Ukraine rerouting cargo away from Russia, and more recently by Hormuz disruptions pushing shippers away from Gulf Sea lanes. Azerbaijan sits right in the middle of all of it. And Silk Way West, as the largest cargo airline in the Caspian and Central Asian region, sits right in the middle of Azerbaijan.

The Singapore route, then, is not just about handling volumes at Changi. It is about what Singapore represents at the other end of the chain, the entry point into South-East Asia’s vast and expanding trade ecosystem. Changi handled 2.08 million tons of airfreight in 2025, up 4.5 percent year on year, driven by semiconductors, AI-related supply chains, electric vehicles and cleantech. The airport connects over 100 airlines to approximately 100 countries. It is, by any measure, the freight gateway to the Asia-Pacific region. Silk Way West operating twice-weekly freighters into it means Baku now has a direct air link into that ecosystem, and through dnata’s handling capability, one that can scale.

A network taking shape

It helps to look at this alongside the other moves Silk Way West and its parent Silk Way Group have been making. In June 2024, the airline signed an MoU with China’s Henan Aviation Group to develop a dual-hub model connecting the Asia-Pacific region with Europe, America and Africa, using Zhengzhou and Baku as the twin anchors. In 2022, it signed an air cargo MoU with Nippon Express to strengthen its Japan market presence, having served Kansai and Narita since 2018 and 2021 respectively.

The through-line here is clear. Silk Way West is not building a hub-and-spoke operation around Baku for the Caspian market alone. It is using Baku as the pivot of a network that stretches east to Japan, south-east to Singapore, west to Amsterdam, Luxembourg and London Stansted, and across the Atlantic to Chicago, Houston, Dallas and Los Angeles. Every new partnership, every new route, every handling agreement tightens that network a little more.

The dnata joint venture at Alat is perhaps the clearest signal of how seriously this strategy is being taken. Alat Free Economic Zone, Azerbaijan’s newly built cargo airport project, will see a dnata-Silk Way Group joint venture begin operations when the terminal opens in April 2027, initially covering cargo and ground handling before expanding into catering and freight forwarding.

What Singapore unlocks

For the air cargo industry, the connectivity between Baku and Singapore opens specific trade lanes that were not previously served with this kind of directness. South-East Asia’s exports of electronics, semiconductors and high-value manufacturing to Europe have typically routed through Middle Eastern mega-hubs or North Asian gateways. A Baku-anchored alternative, with reliable freighter capacity and now competitive ground handling at both ends, gives forwarders another option, one that routes entirely outside of the Gulf airspace that has caused so much disruption in recent months.

It also matters for cargo flowing the other way. Central Asia and the Caucasus are significant exporters of oil and gas equipment, aerospace components and industrial goods, exactly the cargo types named in this dnata agreement.

Azerbaijan is building an air cargo system designed to sit at the center of the world’s most consequential freight geography. Singapore, at this particular moment in global trade, is exactly the right place to anchor the eastern end of it," the article says.