info.afrindex.com
China-Africa Trade Information Service
info.afrindex.com
China-Africa Trade Information Service
Image from qz.com
The air traffic expansion between the African continent and China coincides with the period of rapid expansion of Chinese investment. Chinese companies have been bidding and winning infrastructure projects in Africa.
Chinese firms have helped build airports in Kenya, Mali, Mauritius, Mozambique, Nigeria, the Republic of Congo, Togo, Sierra Leone, among others in recent years.
The Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa, where Zhou's flight took off, serves the most passengers today flying from Africa to China. A new terminal tripled the airport's capacity when it opened this year. It was funded and built by China for $363 million.
As money flows, so do people. The airline fleets operating between China and Africa are now capable of carrying about 850,000 passengers annually.
Most of the expansion is driven by Ethiopian Airlines. It didn't have a single Africa-China route in 2010. Now, it operates almost half of the 2,616 annual flights. It has more than doubled the size of its fleet in the last decade and become the largest airline operator in Africa.
Chinese travelers comprise its largest group of customers, according to Ethiopian's spokesman Asrat Begashaw. The airline flies daily to Guangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing, and three times a week to Chengdu. It announced plans to add three more Chinese destinations.
Ethiopian wasn't the first to try tapping the Chinese market for growth. Kenya Airways started a route between Guangzhou, China and Nairobi, Kenya in 2013 and dropped it in 2015; South African Airways had one route between Johannesburg and Beijing from 2013 to 2015; Air Algeria has kept the same capacity over the last decade; EgyptAir kept about the same number of flights to Beijing and expanded its services to Guangzhou.
