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In September, YTO Airlines, a Hangzhoubased express cargo carrier operated by Shanghai courier company YTO Express, signed a cooperation agreement with Shaanxi Province to jointly build YTO Express' delivery hub and air cargo base in northwest China. Previously, Yu Weijiao, chairman of YTO Express, revealed a decision to invest 3 billion yuan ($450 million) in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, to build YTO's headquarters and air transport hub in southwest China. The move came after the Civil Aviation Administration of China gave the nod in early April to SF Express, another private courier company, to build a civil airport in Ezhou City in central China's Hubei Province as part of a joint move to build an international logistics hub there. The Ezhou airport will operate both cargo and passenger flights, with a focus on cargo delivery. It aspires to become Asia's largest and the world's fourth largest air cargo logistics hub. In September, SF Airlines' third B767-300 cargo plane landed in Shenzhen, boosting the number of the company's all-cargo UPS carefully monitors demand for express air service, and when demand warrants will add a new flight, or increase aircraft gauge, for example from a narrow-body 757 to a wide-body 767 Louis DeJianne UPS planes to 34, the largest among domestic cargo airline companies. Meanwhile, YTO's fifth cargo plane landed smoothly in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, on Sept. 7. The company aims to have 30 self-owned cargo planes in its fleet by 2020. According to industry data, 80 percent of China's domestic mail and parcels are delivered by road, 15 percent by air and less than five percent by other means. Experts say the bottleneck lies in insufficient cargo airports and planes. In 2015, the online shopping market sales reached RMB3.8 trillion in 2015, with a CAGR of 50 per cent over the past five years, thus driving a surge in express delivery industry. In 2015, China’s express delivery business volume totaled 20.67 billion pieces, up 48 per cent from a year earlier, with a CAGR of 54.6 per cent over the past five years; express delivery revenue came to RMB276.96 billion, up 35.4 per cent from a year earlier, registering a CAGR of 37 per cent ver the past five years. In H1 2016, the business volume of Chinese express delivery firms reached 13.25 billion pieces, up 56.7 per cent from the same period of last year; the business revenue totaled RMB171.46 billion, a year-on-year growth rate of 43.4 per cent. In the first half of 2016, express delivery revenue saw a rising proportion of up to 69.3 per cent in the postal service industry revenue.  www.stattimes.com | OCTOBER 2016 23