Air freight digitization in Asia Pacific and the Middle East requires a fundamentally different approach than what works in Europe or the US.
In this conversation, Joyce Tai, EVP of Global Partnerships at Freightos, explains why – and shares the lane-by-lane strategy that helped Freightos partner with nearly every major digitally-enabled carrier in the region.
Joyce has spent 20+ years working in Asian markets for global companies and has seen firsthand why the standard pitch – multichannel distribution, dynamic pricing, yield maximization – falls flat with airlines in Asia Pacific and the Middle East. The core issue? These markets are still focused on minimizing risk, not maximizing yield. That’s a completely different mindset, and it demands a completely different conversation.
Instead of leading with software sales or digitization buzzwords, Joyce’s team reframed the value proposition around operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and a phased, consultative rollout – market by market, lane by lane.
The result: year-over-year doubling of the business in the APAC and Middle East region.
She also dives into what’s happening on the ground in China, where forward-thinking freight forwarders aren’t waiting for ocean carriers or airlines to digitize. They’re building their own digital inventory layers – aggregating rates manually, storing them in proprietary systems, and becoming the digitized sellers themselves. It’s a grassroots digitization movement driven by e-commerce pressure and competitive necessity.Joyce makes a broader case for digitization as an equalizer: freeing up the next generation of logistics workers from copy-paste workflows across 10-20 system screens, and letting data flow to them instead of the other way around.
Key topics covered:
0:00 Introduction
0:10 Why digitization isn’t an IT project
1:01 How Asian and Middle Eastern markets differ from the West
2:57 Changing the narrative: efficiency over buzzwords
4:00 The lane-by-lane approach to carrier partnerships
5:15 China’s freight forwarders building their own digital layer
6:00 Why ocean carriers lag behind in API adoption
8:36 Digitization as an equalizer for the logistics workforce
10:28 Results: doubling APAC growth year over year
