The removal of the US de minimis exemption and the EU's incoming EUR 3 customs duty per e-commerce parcel are not regulatory footnotes. They are structural demand events that will reshape air cargo networks over the next three years.
The US de minimis exemption — the threshold below which imports entered duty-free — was effectively ended for Chinese-origin goods in 2025. The EU announced an incoming EUR 3 customs duty per parcel for e-commerce items below EUR 150, effective July 2026. Both of these changes are presented as trade policy decisions. They are also structural air cargo events.
E-commerce drove a disproportionate share of air cargo demand growth over the past three years. The volume of direct-to-consumer packages flowing from Chinese manufacturing hubs — primarily through platforms like Shein and Temu — created a demand surge on Asia-North America and Asia-Europe lanes that tightened capacity and elevated rates across the market.
That demand driver is now being structurally altered. Not eliminated — the economics of fast fashion and direct-to-consumer e-commerce don't disappear because of a customs threshold change. But the volume migrates. Some flows shift to other origins — Vietnam, Bangladesh, India — where de minimis treatment is different. Some flows shift to pre-positioned inventory in destination markets. Some volumes simply absorb the cost and continue, but with compressed margins that change the competitive dynamics between platforms.
For air cargo operators, each of these migration patterns has different network implications. Flows shifting to Southeast Asian origins require capacity in markets that currently lack the infrastructure to handle the volume. Pre-positioning strategies create demand surges ahead of threshold dates — the front-loading pattern that defined H1 2025 performance. Platform consolidation creates fewer, larger shippers with different negotiating dynamics.
The organizations with predictive intelligence infrastructure will model these migration patterns before they materialize in load data. The ones relying on historical demand curves will react to a structural change that has been visible for 18 months.
IATA projects 2.4% global air cargo demand growth for 2026 — a moderation from 2025's 3.4%. Underneath that headline, the distribution of demand is shifting faster than the aggregate growth rate suggests. The question is not whether your network will be affected by de minimis changes. It's whether your planning function can see where the demand is migrating before it does.
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