ABX Air chief wants DHL operations consolidated in Ohio
The top executive of a company that operates overnight package delivery flights near here says he hopes another air carrier opts to move similar operations to Wilmington.
The consolidation would make sense because the air freight hub near Wilmington run by ABX Air Inc. can handle more packages than DHL’s operations at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, said Joseph C. Hete, ABX’s president and chief executive.
“We have 10 times the volume out of here as DHL handles out of the CVG hub, so we’ve fought some of the battles and the wars that they haven’t even seen yet in the expedited cargo business,” Hete told reporters after addressing stockholders’ Thursday at the first ABX Air shareholders’ meeting as an independent company.
DHL still is considering its options and has not made any decisions, company spokesman Jonathan Baker said Friday from Plantation, Fla.
ABX became an independent cargo airline last August in a deal between its Seattle-based parent company, Airborne Inc., and DHL, a unit of German postal service Deutsche Post AG. DHL bought Airborne’s ground delivery system for USD1.05 billion. To satisfy federal rules prohibiting more than a 25 percent stake in U.S. airlines by foreign owners, Airborne and DHL spun off Airborne’s airline-delivery unit as ABX Air.
As a result of that deal, Hete said he thinks consolidation is inevitable between the Wilmington operation and the DHL hub at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport.
Union leaders representing pilots and other ABX Air flight crew staff have said for months that they are concerned about the possibility of job losses in a consolidation and jobs are moved to DHL’s hub at the Cincinnati airport.
ABX employs about 6,500 workers at the Wilmington hub, about 50 miles northeast of Cincinnati, and handles 1.3 million packages a day there. DHL employs about 1,800 at the Cincinnati airport, where it can handle more than 250,000 packages a night.
ABX posted a USD6 million profit in the first quarter of this year, or 10 cents per share, compared with USD3.7 million and 6 cents a year ago.
