Ukrainian delivery service Nova Poshta steps into the aviation business with the launch of its own airline called Supernova Airlines.
The company announced on Oct. 6 that it will deliver international cargo from airports in Boryspil and Lviv, a city 530 kilometers west of Kyiv.
Nova Poshta registered its airline a week ago and expects to receive a flight permit within the next six months. The company wants to lease two planes, but it hasn’t yet disclosed the models nor the cost of the delivery and the future routes.
“We’re still negotiating it,” Oksana Tarasenko, the spokesperson of Nova Poshta, told the Kyiv Post.
As of today, the company counts on other air carriers, including Ukraine International Airlines, international Turkish Airlines, Silk Way and Lufthansa to deliver its parcels.
Tarasenko said that Nova Poshta will continue working with other carriers but it needs its own aircraft as the volume of deliveries keeps growing.
Last year, for example, Nova Poshta delivered over 7 million parcels abroad — twice as much as in 2019. This year it expects to ramp up the delivery even more. In the first half of 2021, the company has already transported nearly 5 million parcels abroad.
Independent company
Having its own planes lets Nova Poshta be more flexible and independent, experts said. The company can choose its routes, control prices and avoid delays.
“We want to guarantee fast, high quality and predictable delivery,” said Yuri Benevitsky, the head of Nova Poshta Global.
Nova Poshta delivers to and from 220 countries, Benevitsky told the Kyiv Post in August 2020. In 2018, the co-founder of the company Vyacheslav Klimov said that Nova Poshta wanted to use its own aircraft to deliver to China and the U.S. — its most lucrative markets.
The world’s largest delivery services like the U.S.’s Amazon and FedEx or Germany’s DHL all rely on their own planes.
“As soon as there is an economic benefit, we will switch to our own aircraft,” Klimov said back then.
Aviation rebound
Now is a good time to start an aviation business, experts said. Due to the quarantine and travel restrictions, an abundance of free passenger fleets can be transformed into cargo planes.
It is also cheaper to lease planes amid the pandemic, according to Evgeny Khainatsky, CEO of low-cost airline Bees Airlines, launched in February this year. According to Ukrainian aviation expert Evgeny Treskunov, the prices for aircraft leasing have fallen by 30% during the pandemic.
Nova Poshta didn’t disclose how much it invested in its airline. Aviation industry experts said that the cost depends on the type and age of the fleet. Investments like this usually start at $500,000. The price of one Boeing 737 jet, for example, is nearly $106 million. The lease costs on average $10,000 per day, which is nearly $3.6 million a year.
Nova Poshta is big enough to afford it. Last year its net profit increased by 26.6% to over $37 million with revenue of $643 million.
This is not the first time Nova Poshta has tried to experiment with delivery. In July, the company delivered four parcels from Kyiv to Kharkiv using a drone. It took AeroDrone nearly five hours, from 7 a.m. to 12 p.m., to fly 480 kilometers at an altitude of 300 meters above the ground.
In August 2019, Nova Poshta started to use Ukrainian An-26 aircraft to fly cargo from Kyiv to Lviv. This is the same model that’s featured in the Hollywood movie “The Expendables” with Sylvester Stallone. The company no longer uses planes for domestic delivery.
A scene from the Hollywood movie “The Expendables,” featuring the Ukrainian An-26 turboprop light cargo plane.
Nova Poshta has tried to diversify its delivery methods. For example, to deliver cargo from the U.S. to Ukraine, Nova Poshta’s partners transport it by plane to Warsaw, Istanbul, Baku or Copenhagen and then by land to Kyiv Boryspil International Airport.
“We do not exclude other transit delivery methods that will allow us to meet the terms that were promised to the client,” Benevitsky said.
