Southeast Asia Is Becoming a Major Cargo Origin. The Infrastructure Isn’t Ready.
Vietnam overtook China as the primary US origin for laptop imports in 2025. The airport capacity and freighter services to match that role don’t exist yet.
- By import value, the US bought more from Taiwan than China in 2025 for the first time in decades; Vietnam became the primary origin for US laptop imports.
- The air cargo infrastructure — handling capacity, freighter services, cold chain — is being built from a base far below what the demand growth requires.
- The mismatch typically takes 5-7 years to close, which is both a cost for shippers now and an opportunity for operators who commit early.
Vietnam overtook China as the primary US origin for laptop imports in 2025. By import value, the US bought more from Taiwan than from China for the first time in decades. Southeast Asia — Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Cambodia — is becoming a critical origin point in global supply chains, driven by manufacturing diversification away from China and the tariff pressures that accelerated that diversification. The air cargo infrastructure to match that role does not yet exist.
Based in Bangkok, I have direct observation of what this gap looks like in practice. The demand is real and growing. The freighter services, the airport handling capacity, the cold chain and specialist cargo infrastructure, the commercial teams at forwarders with deep origination expertise in these markets — all of this is being built from a significantly lower base than the demand growth requires. Xeneta's data shows rates out of Southeast Asia will be elevated with peaks if capacity is not managed — and what we are actually seeing is a structural mismatch between origin demand and origin capacity that typically takes five to seven years to close.
“The organisations willing to make infrastructure commitments where the load factor data doesn’t yet justify them will look prescient in 2030.”
The operators who built DHL network positions in China in the early 2000s captured a decade of growth at favourable economics because they were infrastructure-present before the volume materialised. The same dynamic is now available in Southeast Asia. This is precisely what the Foresight Over Reaction framework describes: the data showing Southeast Asia's emergence is visible to everyone now, and the operators who capture the value of that emergence are the ones making infrastructure and capacity decisions before the load data makes those decisions obviously correct. Bangkok, as a regional hub, is particularly well-positioned — Suvarnabhumi's capacity, Thailand's role as an automotive and electronics manufacturing base, and its position as a regional transshipment point all make it a logical early investment. The question for operators is not whether to invest here, but how quickly.