The End of De Minimis Changes Air Cargo More Than Anyone Is Saying.
The removal of the US de minimis exemption and the EU's incoming EUR 3 parcel duty are structural demand events, not regulatory footnotes.
- The US de minimis exemption effectively ended for Chinese-origin goods in 2025; the EU adds a EUR 3 duty per e-commerce parcel under EUR 150 from July 2026.
- E-commerce demand doesn't disappear — it migrates, to Southeast Asian origins, to pre-positioned inventory, and to fewer, larger platform shippers.
- IATA projects 2.4% global air cargo growth for 2026, down from 3.4% in 2025, with capacity growing faster than demand.
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 e-commerce parcel for items below EUR 150, effective July 2026. Both 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, because 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 where de minimis treatment is different: Vietnam, Bangladesh, India. Some flows shift to pre-positioned inventory in destination markets. Some volumes simply absorb the cost and continue, with compressed margins that change competitive dynamics between platforms.
“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.”
For air cargo operators, each migration pattern 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 organisations with predictive intelligence infrastructure will model these migration patterns before they materialise in load data. IATA projects 2.4% global air cargo demand growth for 2026, a moderation from 2025's 3.4% — and underneath that headline, the distribution of demand is shifting faster than the aggregate growth rate suggests.