I’d like to begin by wishing everyone a heartfelt Kung Hei Fat Choy and best wishes for the year of the Horse.

The Year of the Horse year signifies intense energy, rapid change and high-speed progress, which is especially true of our digitalisation programme. Our corporate strategy highlights not only continued digitalisation but also the adoption of AI. We’re focused not just to making processes more efficient but developing cathaycargo.com into a one-stop-shop for customers, from introducing self-management for customer bookings or applying machine learning to market dynamics, helping refine our pricing strategy later this year.

While AI technologies are creating demand on board our aircraft with shipments of server racks and semiconductors for data centres, this is also aligned with our new corporate strategy. This year, work will include an AI-powered import/export control check to help frontline teams ensure the right documents are included with shipments depending on type, origin and destination. We’re also exploring agentic AI to handle some customer inquiries received by the reservation team, and work continues with a proof-of-concept trial in the Americas.

Of course, 2026 is not just the Year of the Horse – January also marked the implementation of IATA ONE Record as the preferred standard for exchanging data across the air cargo logistics chain. Cathay Cargo has been live with ONE Record use cases for some time, including shipment records and tracking. As a leader in air cargo digitalisation, we introduced real-time Customs clearance information last year, bringing another stakeholder and their data into the ONE Record ecosystem for customers with API links into our system.

We will share our industry-leading experience and demonstrate how the standard can facilitate greater efficiency when we host a ONE Record promotion event with IATA in Hong Kong in April. That will be followed by an IATA hackathon, hosted at Cathay City.

There will be a lot happening this year, and whatever it holds, I hope it is successful for you.

Kicking off the year with an equine spectacular

As the Founding Partner of the Longines Hong Kong International Horse Show, Cathay Cargo was tasked again with flying in around 60 horses on a charter from Liège for the event. We go behind the scenes to experience the journey from the perspective of the horses, and see how the process enabled these equine athletes to perform at their best during their short stay in Hong Kong.

Read more: Winged horses

Resilience in Anchorage

As part of our focus on the people who keep our customer promise, we catch up with the ramp team at Anchorage, who work in all weathers around the clock to check in our freighters and flight crews at our second busiest hub after Hong Kong.

Read more: Cathay Cargo’s Anchorage team are pit-stop experts

Cathay Cargo – 80 years of We Know How

While digitalisation is shaping our future, we’ll also be looking back this year at some landmark moments and developments that have shaped Cathay Cargo into the combination cargo carrier we know and love. We start this month by exploring fleet and network highlights from 1946 to the present day.

Read more: 80 years of fleet and network highlights