Siddhant Iyer

Tell me a bit about your Cathay career

I’ve been with Cathay for 17 years now and have worked in Cargo for more than 13 of those, with roles in South Asia, then another as Regional Head of Cargo for Southeast Asia. Since 2023, I’ve been in Hong Kong as Head of Cargo Markets and Solutions, looking after our special solutions, specifically their design and development, along with business development through engagement with the outports on their commercial performance and KPIs.

Tell me about your new role?

The new role is Head of Cargo Global Partnerships. In short, it’s about keeping relationships strong with our key global freight forwarder customers by understanding their needs and how we can work closely as partners to ensure strategic value for each other. To achieve our vision of becoming the world’s best air-cargo carrier, we need to collaborate with our global partners on network opportunities, special solutions and tonnage share to drive expansion. From there, we can also work together on systems integration, digitalisation and sustainability. That’s not only sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) but initiatives beyond it. There’s lots more that we can do together, which is exciting. 

How does it differ from your last role?

My last role was more internal-facing. There were some interactions with customers when it came to designing solutions like Cathay Pharma or Cathay Dangerous Goods, but the job was more about engaging with our internal and regional teams. I am excited to be going back into a customer-facing role. I will understand more about what’s happening in the industry. There will be a lot more travel to engage with our partners and get a different perspective on the industry and our performance. 

Is the role changing from Chris’s tenure?

Yes, slightly. The change for our expanded team is that we are starting to look beyond our existing accounts who support us globally. They remain pivotal, but we’re broadening the pipeline of potential tactical accounts that may require a greater degree of corporate relationship management, which is something they may not get from a siloed geographical management structure. 

What are the immediate challenges and opportunities?

Siddhant: The immediate challenges come from the uncertainty around the geopolitical situation and its impact on air cargo industry . However, it also gives us an opportunity to work even more closely with our global partners, so that we can get the best value for them and for us .

Chris: I was supposed to move to my new post on 1 January, but I agreed with Director Cargo Tom Owen that I would stay and see through the Block Space Agreement (BSA) contract period, which ordinarily is finished by the end of February. Normally it takes one to two rounds of negotiations, a fine tune and then signing. This year it’s gone to three and sometimes four rounds because of the volatility and changes. So my grand design was that I’d give Sidd a clean slate to move on with, but instead I’ve left him with a slightly messy one.

What about specific challenges in the new role? 

The air freight industry is strongly based on the relationships we form and the global spread of our partners. Creating personal rapport in a relatively short time is not easy, especially when you have customers as far afield as Miami and Marseille. Furthermore, we always aim to deliver the shipments as per the bookings but there are times when we will have uncontrollable delays and disruptions. The key is to keep our customers informed proactively and work together on alternative solutions.

What are you most looking forward to in your new cargo role?

I’m looking forward to working with a team which is already engaged in relationship management and meeting our global partners. I’m excited to get to know some new faces and because I’ve been in the industry for a while, I already know some of the others. It will be good to see them again and understand their needs as customers.

What do you do in your spare time?

I love playing cricket, tennis and badminton. I also enjoy reading in my spare time. 

Chris Bowden

Tell us about your new role

I am staying within the Swire and aviation families and I’m moving to HAECO, a group of companies with an MRO (maintenance, repair, overhaul) presence in the US, the Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong and Europe, which employs around 15,000 people. I will be Group General Manager for Safety and Quality, and my principal remit is to build on the excellent foundations of their culture and push it to the next level. 

What is the achievement you will look back on at Cathay Cargo with the most pride?

There’s a few. The first is the increase over time of the size of the BSA contracts across all of the global partners, which I hope is testament to how relationship management can create opportunities for bigger deals, not only in our core business but in other areas. For example, the deal with DB Schenker on SAF was the biggest sustainability deal that Cathay had signed at the time, and it was rewarding because it was taking a partnership beyond the transactional world of air freight into a real strategic partnership.

While I didn’t have day-to-day oversight of the Cathay Cargo rebrand, we crowned it with a great event where we had more than 100 customers in a hangar around a freshly painted Boeing 747 freighter in 2023 in June – apologies for that, it was hot! And then the last thing has been the internal focus on engagement that has helped get our team net promoter score as high as it has ever been. 

What is the biggest lesson you have learned in your time at Cathay Cargo?

I think specific to airfreight is that no day is ever the same. You can’t predict how this business is going to run, because everything that happens around the world can affect it. You need to be very aware of what’s going on and assess how that could potentially impact the business. The other big lesson is that this is a people business. Relationships matter, and the trust that you can foster with customers and within teams is really what makes the business tick. 

What will you miss most?

It’s a cliché, but people is the big one. I’ve moved so many times that moving jobs is okay, because I understand the process. But the hardest part is leaving people. It’s like an amicable breakup. One day you’re spending all your time with them, and then the next, it’s like a clean cut and you’re not. It’s quite hard to adapt to, and that applies to the partners as well. A lot of relationships have developed over the past three years, from the hardest period with COVID through to the better times, and onto more challenging times now. You build up a lot of rapport, and by not being involved, that will dissipate. And while the travel got difficult towards the end of my tenure, I will even miss that.

If you had one piece of advice for Siddhant, what would it be?

Quit cricket and start going to football! Sidd doesn’t need advice from me because he knows how the business works, but I would say you can’t spend enough time getting to know our partners. These customers make Cathay Cargo tick, but they also make your day-to-day job tick. So the value of those personal relationships and going beyond the day to day is really significant.