Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Cargojet's First Inaugural Investor Conference. Thank you all so much for taking the time to join us today. We have a comprehensive agenda today for you. I would like to introduce myself. My name is Pauline Dhillon. I'm the Chief Corporate Officer. We have a comprehensive agenda for you. We have a couple of breaks scheduled, one at about 11:15 A.M. and lunch at 12:30 P.M., which will be followed by various tours. We're offering five tours today. One of them will be the simulator that you see here. One will be into a 767 aircraft, the maintenance hangar, our sort facility, and our control center, where you're gonna see how they operate and how everyone controls the loads for the aircraft.
Our presenters today are our CEO, Dr. Ajay Virmani. Jamie Porteous, our Chief Strategy Officer. Scott Calver, our Chief Financial Officer. Our senior leadership team is also presenting. Paul Rinaldo, our Senior Vice President of Maintenance and Engineering. Gord Johnston, our Senior Vice President, Strategic Partnerships. Vito Cerone, our Senior Vice President, Sales and Customer Experience. George Sugar, our Senior Vice President, Regulatory Compliance. Brent Card, our Senior Vice President, Flight Operations. Derek Palmer, Vice President, Transformation and Operational Excellence. Before we jump into the first presentation, we want to show you a video of Cargojet that shows you our journey over the last 20 years. If we could please have the video go live.
Air cargo services. We are committed to safely and consistently delivering exceptional, flexible, and best on-time performance to our customers.
Departure Cargojet 500.
We own and operate a full fleet of Boeing long-range freighters, carrying millions of pounds of cargo each day to all major international destinations. Our network is an essential utility, consistently providing a 24-hour a day, seven-day a week operation servicing over 90% of Canadians coast to coast.
Cargojet 911, you're clear to take off.
We operate our own in-house technologically advanced control center with state-of-the-art pilot training facilities.
223 flight.
Cargojet is a global leader in providing time-sensitive overnight air cargo services. We are committed to safely and consistently delivering exceptional, flexible, and best on-time performance to our customers.
Departure, Cargojet 500.
We own and operate a full fleet of Boeing long-range freighters, carrying millions of pounds of cargo each day to all major international destinations. Our network is an essential utility, consistently providing a 24-hour a day, seven-day a week operation servicing over 90% of Canadians coast to coast.
Cargojet 911, you're clear to take off.
We operate our own in-house technologically advanced control center with state-of-the-art pilot training facilities.
223 flight completed.
Flight simulators, in-house flight dispatch, flight loading, and live flight and network tracking systems. Cargojet Airways has been recognized as an approved maintenance organization and an approved flight simulator operator by Transport Canada.
7,000 is checked.
As well as carrying a complete inventory of aircraft parts. Our commitment, dedication, and on-time performance have led to us being leaders in the industry. We have won several industry awards, including being selected as one of Canada's 50 Best Managed Companies. Cargojet is the only Canadian air cargo carrier that is IATA certified and has achieved an ISO 9001:2015 quality standard accreditation. For 20 years, we have been recognized by Canadians and honored with the Shipper's Choice Award. Our CEO, Dr. Virmani, has been recognized by Canada's Walk of Fame, celebrated as Strategist of the Year by The Globe and Mail, and Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young. He attributes the success of Cargojet to the hard work and effort of his dedicated team.
Our international growth and expansion is the fulfillment of the vision of a bold and cutting edge entrepreneur, Dr. Ajay Virmani.
The founding reason of Cargojet in 2001, set up a cargo airline that will provide reliable, cost-efficient, overnight service to all of our customers every day. The reason Cargojet has grown to be a market leader is one element, consistent overnight service, and that's provided by our team, our people.
If you're new, we have speed times on all our workstations, and we're doing a great job meeting them. Let's keep up the great work, okay, guys?
Our core principles respect, equality, fairness, diversity, and teamwork are the cornerstones of our business philosophy and the foundation of our success.
What has made Cargojet truly successful is our culture. Everyone feels that they are part of Cargojet. We would not be who we are or what we are without our team. We have millions of dollars invested in facilities and aircraft, but the one thing that we invest the most in is our team. We are on 24 hours, seven days a week. Our willingness to come together, no matter what the weather, no matter what the situation, our team has truly defined what a community and a family we are.
Cargojet is the first and only air cargo operator in Canada to introduce the wide-body, fuel-efficient all-cargo Boeing 777 freighters.
The 777 aircraft carries twice the payload of an existing 767 that we're standing in today, but burns significantly less fuel than two 767s would otherwise burn, making us a lot more fuel efficient and climate friendly. One opportunity that's gonna provide for Cargojet, and ultimately for our customers, is to leverage our connectivity that we have with the 16 cities that we operate our domestic network with the international destinations that we're gonna operate the 777s to. I would say that in the next five to 10 years, Cargojet will continue to grow and will be a significant international cargo player in addition to being the dominant Canadian cargo airline that we are today.
By remaining true to Cargojet's formula for success and our founding values, we look confidently toward the future.
Cargojet continues to redefine industry standards. We have the cargo culture, we have the cargo pedigree, and every minute counts. We don't have to worry about passengers. We have one product to sell, which is cargo. We wanna make sure that our customers get the service they deserve, they pay for, and that's what makes us the market leader. Rethinking how to serve the customer better, nurturing relationships, and remembering that it is the personal attention that makes us all successful at Cargojet.
Just a reminder of our forward-looking statements. With that, I will open up today's conference with our CEO, Ajay Virmani.
Good morning. What do you guys think about the video? Nobody cheers. Thank you, everybody for coming out. I know Hamilton is quite far from Toronto. We could have arranged a cargo flight for all of you guys from the island airport, but didn't work out. Let me start with I wanna share a little bit of Cargojet journey before. I think a lot of people know about it, and a lot of people are new, I noticed. I wanna share a couple of journey stories, how we got here, what we are, and why we are. Let's start with this hangar. This was a hangar built in about 15, 16 years ago, by WestJet. We tried to buy this hangar.
WestJet was going to be a dominant player in Ontario using Hamilton as a hub, and this was their first hangar. It was built for CAD 8.5 million at that time. It was considered the Taj Mahal of all hangars. They did not spare any efforts. They were gonna build four or five of these. After six months, they decided that Hamilton was not the place, and they're going to Toronto. We approached them. I called Clive Beddoe, who's the CEO at WestJet, and I said, "I'm interested in buying your hangar in Hamilton." He said, "Why don't you come to Calgary and we'll have a chat?" I said, "Okay." I flew into Calgary. I was about half an hour late. I was made to wait about an hour in the reception.
I figured because I'm late, so he must have taken another meeting, which later he told me that was on purpose. He asked me, "Why are you late?" I said, "Well, the flight was late. Some had de-icing delays at Toronto Airport." He says, "We didn't have any delays. How did you fly here?" I said, "I flew Air Canada." He said, "Why did you fly Air Canada?" I said, "Well, because we have an agreement with them. They give us business class passes. You know, we don't like to spend money if we can save money, so I flew Air Canada." I was standing in his office. He didn't offer me a chair. He says, "How much are you offering for the hangar?" I said, "You got it listed for CAD 8 million.
Let's sit down and make a deal. That's what I'm here for." He said, "Well, I'm not making any deals. Last time I checked, I had CAD 120 million in my bank account. And if you're gonna offer me CAD 7 million, CAD 8 million, whatever you're gonna offer me, I don't need your lousy CAD 8 million. You can leave." I thought he was joking. He said. I said, "Can we sit down and talk about this?" He says, "No. You heard me. You can leave my office." It was a 30-second conversation. I came out of that. I said, "Look, I've never been treated like this in my life, and I am persistent." The message was we were persistent. We pursued this hangar for 13 years. Not with him. As we got a chance, we tried with everybody who's in the management there.
After that, after 15 years, they had a new CEO. Clive was still the Chairman. I made sure he was on holidays when I went to meet the new CEO. Guess what? We bought the hangar for CAD 7.5 million 15 years later. What it's down to is that I think if we see a value in any transaction, if we see a value in any asset, we can enhance our operations in any which way. We are very stubborn. We're very persistent. We have a vision, we have a dream. If you're not stubborn about it, there is no moving forward. This is a perfect example of someone getting thrown out of the office.
Now it's gonna house a simulator here, another simulator here, and our training center outside. We've got a beautiful control room, operational excellence center there. I think this building today is probably worth about CAD 20 million. You know, we're pretty happy that we got this building after what we went through. I wanna go on to the why it is relevant to the Cargojet stories, because the Cargojet story is all about persistence in my opinion. I successfully in 1999 sold my freight forwarding business in shipping and logistics warehousing business to an American company by 1999. By 2000, I was itching to do something different.
For 15 years that I was in that freight forwarding business, from 1985 to 2000, I saw 14 cargo airlines started and folding because I was buying services from them. Jamie, actually, my founding partner, worked for six of them. I used to joke with him, "Who do you work for now?" Glad you worked and got all the experience that you brought here. What I found was there was a need for a cargo carrier that would provide an overnight consistent service. A cargo carrier that can correct the imbalance in this country. The imbalance was everything was going from Toronto or Montreal to East or West, and hardly anything was coming back. The country is so vast, you have to cover 16 cities. You have to be 5:00 A.M. every city.
You have to perform at 98%, and you got this imbalance. How do you correct that? It was very difficult because every airline that came in had two planes, three planes. They were flying for UPS, they were flying for Loomis, they were flying for FedEx, they were flying for DHL, Canada Post, Purolator. Everybody had their own little. There was no scale, there was no synergy, there was no cost sharing. I observed that as a buyer of services that this need was needed, this airline was needed. The biggest dream that we had was how do we bring everybody together, get a scale, and be able to serve better?
Every customer, whether you have a brown plane, purple plane, red plane, white plane, yellow plane, how about everybody comes together in the middle of the night in a white plane and product is delivered. Everybody shares the overhead. They have the lowest cost. They have the same service. We cover every city. We provide 98%, 99% on time performance, and they can fly it in the morning from 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. That was the vision that brought Cargojet. Everybody said to us at that time that this is a vision which will never happen. Why? Because you do not understand the egos of Brown. I said, "I understand." Browns have no ego, by the way. Purple, yellow, red, white, nobody's gonna travel on each other's planes. They all want their own shiny planes. This is never going to happen.
I said, "Okay, well, let's take a chance. We are persistent, we are stubborn. We believe in our ideas, and I think if we can show the value, we can bring everybody together." That was the vision of Cargojet when we started. I think, you know, becoming the partner of choice, middle mile was not a big term in those days. It is now with the e-commerce. First mile, middle mile, and last mile. We were the middle mile. We did airport to airport. We never did pickup deliveries or first mile or last mile. We did not wanna be competitive with our customers. We just wanna provide air to airport, and that was our vision. What happened with that vision?
As you'll see it on the next slide, we not only got all the browns, purples, yellows, whites, reds on it, but also diversified. We built on it. We added a lot more to what our vision was. We also got lucky on the way. In 2016, 2017, when Amazon came to us, they were very small. They had one container, you know, 2000 lbs going to Western Canada. We started with them when they started in Canada. E-commerce became a big factor in the mid in 2015, 2016. That's when it started to take off. If you look at it today, we have, by bringing everybody together, I think we have offered a really consistent service, which is important to all of our clients because every minute counts.
If you think people say you're in the cargo business because you guys can't handle the pressure of passenger business. No, we can't. They say cargo doesn't speak, and I think cargo speaks louder than the passengers because you have. Imagine you have 100,000 shipments going to Vancouver in one plane, which is 15 minutes late. There's gonna be 10,000 customers who will not get their deliveries by 9:00 A.M. Which means our customers will offer refund services, and you're gonna be getting calls all morning long because those 3,000 couriers will not make the downtown deliveries. That's how sensitive on-time performance is.
When we brought everybody together with better aircraft, fuel efficiencies, sharing the overhead, and not having six or eight different carriers, it made sense to this marketplace because the country is very vast to be serviced by a few carriers. This was sort of the vision. This was the dream. 14 airlines had failed before we did, or they closed their doors. Why? What were we thinking? Why should we be successful? The 14 others, they were not dummies. They were great organizations, some of them. There was one thing common that they all had, and we did not wanna have. There's a distinction because our product 100% was cargo, and all the other 14 were attached to a passenger airline. You got two 737s. Royal Cargo started in the business.
One is cargo plane going to Vancouver, and the other one is going to Florida in the morning. The pilot doesn't show up for the passenger plane. They steal the pilot from the cargo plane. If you need a part on a passenger plane, steal it from a cargo plane. What happened three months ago? We saw all the baggage mess at every airport in the world. The result was every cargo person at every airline in Canada or in U.S., every cargo person was pulled out of their normal duties and put into passenger service to sort out the baggages. For three months, there was no passenger cargo going on. There was no belly cargo going on. This is 100% of our business. When a passenger airline does cargo, it's 5%-7% or 8% of their business.
When you are 8% of the business, you're gonna get 8% attention, if you're lucky. This is our only product, and that was a key differentiating factor between those 14 carriers and Cargojet. To top it all up, before the 14 airlines went bankrupt, everybody said we should get our heads checked before we invest in this venture. Two reasons, because of the past record of cargo businesses in Canada and the second was, we were starting right after 9/11. They said, "You are going to be in aviation business after 9/11? Nothing is flying. Nothing is going to happen." Again, we had a vision. We thought every challenge that comes in, and you will see that, as we demonstrate further, every challenge that came in creates an opportunity, and that's what Cargojet's always been built on.
How do we take advantage of this challenge and turn that into an opportunity? Because 9/11 was a challenge for everybody. There was no flying. We also picked up our first, second, third, and fourth 727s for CAD 800,000 each when they were on the books of some company for CAD 8 million each. To get planes at CAD 0.10 on the dollar. We, after 15 years of use, sold them for CAD 1.5 million to some African company. Obviously, that challenge, combined with the challenge of others going bankrupt and we believing in our business model, is what Cargojet beginning for. That's how Cargojet was started. That's how it was conceived. That was the vision. Our team has a great sense of getting things done.
We have an entrepreneurial culture. We have a culture that we believe in ourselves. Failure is not an option, and we make things happen. Cargojet is a result of all these factors, as you see today. As we look at every step, Cargojet has been battle-tested. Every challenge that I said has given an opportunity and made us stronger. Our team, like I talked about, customer obsession, our term is that way. That we don't say no to our customers. We make it happen. Again, I talk about the entrepreneurial spirit and the employee culture. Our customers. Why we have every courier and freight forwarder believing in us is because of the strategic partnerships we form with most of our customers. We provide them a little better service than anybody else can provide.
We have departures at midnight, and the cargo comes in 10 minutes before. We make sure we have a provision to load it in 10 minutes and be ready to fly out. Our cost sharing, our overhead sharing with our customers. Many value-added features that we have built with our strategic partners that has been the strength of Cargojet. We have come through many battle-tested. You know, 9/11 was a big one. Recession of 2008, it was a really bad one. Cargojet came out, did very well out of it. In 2013 and 2014, Canada Post and Purolator RFP was out. We have been trying for 15 years to convince them that this is the right model. Your model does not work. Anytime you have two extra containers, you have to roll a plane.
We'll give you growth at variable cost. If you're down, we can downscale it because we got so many other customers. Your product is very light on Purolator side and on your Canada Post side, you have very dense letter mail. Why don't we combine it together and give you guys a better payloads and better densities? Finally, the RFP came out, which was handled very fairly, and Cargojet was winners of that RFP. We were given 12 months to get ready for a transition. It was a big transition. We were ready in eight months. We had a parallel system running in eight months. In 2018, we were challenged by Amazon with their growth. We had some planes on order, some planes we redid our network. We made sure we had enough planes for their growth.
2020 was another challenge, COVID. I must say that I'm so proud of those teams that for that whole year when nobody was going out, Cargojet was at work. We had secured all the PPE, the hand sanitizers. We were supplying meals. We would pay off CAD 75 a day cash to every employee. The result was we had the best year in 2020 and 2021. We had the best growth, we had the best profitability. You know, the most important factor, we never missed or delayed a flight because of COVID. On top of it, we were able to do over 100 charters just to China alone to bring PPE into this country because no hospital had any masks, no hospitals had any syringes, no hospital had any gauzes.
We were able to bring all the medical supplies, including masks, into every Canadian province and every Canadian hospital. We gave up an opportunity to make $80 million extra because we were offered similar or better deals, sometimes double the money by American hospitals and American government that if we were able to switch those planes coming to Canada to come to New York or go to Chicago, you know, the money was double. We decided, look, we're making enough good margin. This is a country that has given us the opportunity. They need us right now, and we were able to serve the country at the same time. Our people took it as if we are in a war.
Everybody showed up to work, and I think it was great when we looked at the end of both years. We said, "How many delays just because of COVID people didn't show up?" We had testing centers at every location where the private nurses were doing the testing to make sure everything is healthy. Everybody's healthy. We never missed a day, never had a delay. I'm so proud of the team that they accomplished that. You know, growth is great. One thing we realized in 2017, 2018 was that we were very domestic-focused. 90% of our business was all within Canada. Don't like to put all our eggs in one basket, and we wanted to diversify. We started to aggressively. Now we have bigger aircraft that have the range.
We aggressively started to sell charter programs. To sell charter programs, we looked at opportunities where the aircraft are available, what city they are in, are they available for the weekend? Can we do a two-day charter? Can we do a three-day charter? Can we redo the network somewhere? Do we have enough pilots? Do we have maintenance people? We developed a very robust charter program. That actually is one of the most profitable segments because when people need charters on demand, you know, you get a very good price for it. We said we need to further diversify, and this is where we were tested during COVID. One of our strongest partners is DHL.
We were able to convince DHL over the past three, four years to build a great facility next to us so we can be close together and do our distribution and network and hub and spoke together. DHL had no belly space during COVID, and they asked us. Every week there was a request, "Can you give us another plane? Can you give us another plane?" You know, in 2016 and 2017, we booked a lot of conversion slots on spec. Not that we knew that COVID was gonna happen, not that we knew, but we knew that we had to grow our ACMI business. Again, that decision-making showed us that we were ready for that.
Miracles happened, and we were able to supply DHL with 10 planes during COVID from our, you know, network reconfiguration, and some of them were on order, some we took deliveries during that time. That was a big start for our ACMI business, which has become really big. It's one of the biggest pieces of the business today. There's no risk in the ACMI business. The only risk you have is obviously to make sure that you are performing your performance fee is where it is. Big advantage for companies like DHL, because they don't have the belly space that they used to have as a carrier.
Yes, the belly space we always talk about is coming back a little bit, but if you look at DHL's model was freighters and belly space, whereas UPS and FedEx believed in their own planes. DHL had the most cost-efficient model combining the two, belly and the freighters. Now they have increased the freighters a little more than belly because they can't depend on it, because for two years now, they have spoiled their customers. They are saying, "We want more freighters because everything is organized." Previously, there were shipments coming from London to Toronto, which were split on four different flights, and they were never competitive with UPS and FedEx. Now we do a flight from them from London to Hamilton, and all their stuff comes in here. It's done the next morning. Now, all of a sudden, they are competitive with theirs.
They cannot take away that competitive factor. I think what we have done is done, caused a permanent shift of some of the customer habits and their customers and made them more competitive with our aggressive growth strategy at the same time. Some of these shifts are permanent, and at the end of the day, we feel that there is going to be some business that's gonna go back to belly. 747s are gone, 380s are gone. Those were the biggest belly businesses. They're all gone. What are we left with is 777s, basically, or A350 aircraft. There's a lot of narrow bodies that are gonna fly internationally.
I think there's a hybrid model, that some of the belly business will go back, obviously, but we feel a lot of it will be retained by the freighters. Again, we are not looking at it, what's gonna happen two months from now, three months from now. We have learned enough in this business. We know the cycles. We know what we're gonna face. That's why we look four to six years out on what can we expect four years from now? What can we expect three years from now? I think that's how we need to plan for our business. We understand our business is very capital-intensive, labor-intensive. It takes six months before you hire a pilot and train them through this and live training to bring them on board. We can't run a business quarter to quarter or a year to year.
We are thinking four years out. We're thinking five years out. What does this look like? Where do we wanna be as a company? How diversified we wanna be? How profitable we wanna be? How, you know, what is our right mix of, you know, providing service to the customer at the price that they can afford, and we can make money at the same time? Just talking briefly about I know there has been a lot of talk about belly versus the freighter side of things. You know, major strategic rethink is underway at passenger airlines, like routes, fleets, workforce capacity. Prior to COVID, 50% of business was all cargo businesses on the belly business. During COVID, 90% of the business or almost 100% was on the freighters.
We feel somewhere there's a good mix between 65%-75% of the business is going to shift into the freighter side of the market. Boeing projects 111% growth of e-commerce from 2019 to 2024. Freighters, 767s, which is the workhorse of every cargo airline, are not gonna be produced after 2026. Boeing is gonna shut down that line. There's a very limited fleet stock that is now available for conversion. It's the hottest airplane, and we have about eight of them that we have lined up over the next two years during two of the fleet. I must tell you, majority of the fleet, with an exception of a couple of planes that we wanna use for international growth and connectivity, every plane has a customer attached to it today.
I just wanna walk through our strategy that has revolved, evolved to reflect our growing scale and capabilities. We were domestic overnight-focused. Now, we are a diversified portfolio of domestic, international, charter, ACMI, CMI, charters, and dry leasing. We had highly concentrated customer base. Now we have a highly diversified customer base with long-term strategic contracts, staggered expiry dates. We had a highly leveraged balance sheet. I think I'm very happy and take pride in the fact that we've built a very strong balance sheet with very low leverage. Mix of narrow body and wide body fleet. Today, fully wide body fleet with a strong fleet stock. All aircraft was leased at one time. Today, 90% of our fleet is paid for. Focus on scale and growth. Focus on balanced growth today. Margin discipline and risk mitigation. We had a very small leadership team.
Today, we have highly experienced, diversified, and one of the best professional aviation team in the country. I hear a lot of noise. I've heard it from a lot of you guys. I read the papers. I talk to a lot of people. Everybody's talking about inflation. Everybody's talking about high crude prices, geopolitical tensions, wars, rising interest rates, economic slowdowns. Well, all I can tell you guys is we are not immune to any of this. Are we ever equipped to deal with this? We are in the best position to deal with this. This is why we built the war chest. We have CAD 1 billion worth of liquidity. We have the strongest balance sheet of any airline in the world. We have the strongest customer contracts and strategic partnerships of any airline out there.
I think, yes, we know that there is all these turbulences out there, but we feel we have the power. We have the human power, we have the machine power, and we have that persistence and stubbornness to come out of this, and we will. We have a solid domestic network, which certainly, I said to my team the other day, I said, "Even if you gave me a hundred..." We started this business with CAD 20 million, and I said, "Somebody gave me CAD 100 million and repeat this, I could not even repeat this." The way this has come about in the last 15 years, I cannot even repeat with my team. We have blue-chip customers with long-term contracts, strong balance sheet and risk mitigation, highly focused on safety and customer service. That is very critical.
On-time performance and safety go hand in hand. If you maintain your plane well and you have to bring in qualified labor force, you will get safety, you will get on-time performance. We're also committed to environmental, social, and governance charter. After COVID, we are resetting our long-term opportunities that have changed the face of the business. In short, I must say that combined with our liquidity, combined with our strong balance sheet, low leverage, with our customer contracts, concentration of the market, our highly professional and qualified workforce, and our discipline, where minutes matter. We can have all the planes, we can have the simulators, we can have the best equipment in the world, but if we don't have the customer obsession, and if our people do not believe that every minute counts, we do not deliver the performance, we are nothing.
That's what we believe we have. I think we will continue to grow. We will continue to overcome the challenges that we have come in the past 20 years. We'll take those challenges, turn them into opportunities, and we will be one of the most admired cargo airlines, not just in Canada, but around the world. Thank you very much.
I guess that's me. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to our Inaugural Investor Day. Today is an opportunity for the entire Cargojet team to provide, adding to Ajay's comments, just to provide you some insights into our business and what makes us unique, and Ajay touched on a bunch of them, but also into our industry and certainly some of the growth opportunities that present themselves to us over the next five to 10-year period. You know, one of the things I was thinking when Ajay was talking about, you know, our singular focus on cargo and being in that business and when we started the business 22, 23 years ago, I remember, it reminded me, I hadn't thought about this in a long time.
Somebody asked me one day, you know, "How'd you guys ever come up with the name Cargojet?" I couldn't remember, but I did remember now. We were sitting in a room, Ajay, myself, Pauline, our previous partner, Dan Mills, trying to come up with a name on what we would call this business because we had taken it over from Canada 3000 and Royal Cargo. I think the CFO had all sorts of crazy ideas of what the name should be. I don't know who came up with it. One of us came up with it. We said, "Well, how about we just call it Cargoj et? It's what we do.
We fly cargo in jets, and that's gonna be our singular focus, and that's gonna be our priority. Here we are 23 years later, and I think we've done a pretty good job of building that business and we'll continue to do so. As Ajay mentioned, can you flip to the slide? You know, certainly Cargojet's been a COVID-19 pandemic beneficiary. However, they're not just short-term benefits. As Ajay mentioned, there's been a structural shift in our industry that is both sustainable and will have a long-term impact on our industry. As Ajay said, prior to the pandemic, more than 50% of global air cargo traveled in the belly of passenger aircraft. As he indicated, mostly wide-body, older generation, 747, A380s that were operating transcontinental. Most have been, if not all.
I think I saw a statistic recently that there was 127 747 freighters flying over. There's four today in the world. Today, most of that international traffic, as Ajay mentioned, some of it will go back, but we estimate about 70% of the global air cargo today is carried in freighter aircraft. Global e-commerce's growth has certainly also been pulled forward several years by the pandemic, creating a classic case of a supply and demand imbalance that we believe is gonna be here for many years. What's the next slide, please? As Ajay mentioned, the global freighter fleet. Sorry, you're ahead of me a bit. Back a couple. More. More. Back a little. That's it.
This slide gives you an illustration of the expected freighter fleet production over the next 10 to 15-year period. As Ajay mentioned, Boeing is gonna stop producing the 767 as a production aircraft in 2026. It still obviously would fly a huge fleet of 767 aircraft. They'll still be operating and flying for the next 20 or 30 years. But the production of that aircraft type will end, so there's gonna be a continued imbalance and shortage of freighter aircraft in the next few years. It's one of the reasons why we made the CapEx expenditures and announcements we made earlier this year that Scott will provide some additional color on later today.
Certainly, e-commerce remains to be a major driver of our growth, both here in Canada on our domestic network and globally with our ACMI business and the international opportunities that are presenting themselves. Canada is still Amazon's fastest-growing country in the world, as they tell us, because of the low penetration rate of online sales as a percentage of overall retail sales here in Canada. As Ajay mentioned, you know, macroeconomic factors, inflation, interest rates, et cetera, may soften overall consumer spending, but we feel Cargojet will continue to benefit from the significant volume growth driven by e-commerce on all three segments of our business, the domestic, our ACMI, and our international business. As you mentioned, our service offerings have evolved to meet those growing customer needs.
As Ajay also alluded to, about six or seven years ago, prior to COVID, we had embarked on a strategic initiative internally at Cargojet, and it wasn't to lessen the dependence on our domestic business. It's a significant and growing part of our business, obviously a beneficiary of e-commerce growth. Our strategic decision was, let's grow the other segments of our business, namely the ACMI and the international and charter business, to lessen the dependence on the domestic business, which is very much, as compared to the ACMI and charter business, a volume-centric business. Although we have long-term contracts with major customers with minimum volume guarantees or take or pay type agreements with cost pass-through provisions for variable costs that we don't control, like fuel, they are more volume-centric and volume during the heavy demand period like the fourth quarter.
Obviously, revenues and volumes go up, but equally during a recession or during downtimes, overall volume can go down, and we wanted to offset that with the more fixed costs or the more fixed revenue of our ACMI business and our international and typically charter business, which are fixed. I think we've done a tremendous job of doing that. As you see here, we've built our domestic network with global brand name customers, expanded our ACMI and CMI business over the last really over the last five or six years. We've been in the ACMI business for almost the entire existence of Cargojet, but certainly over the last four, five years, primarily with DHL, where we operate 15 dedicated aircraft on an ACMI basis today and two aircraft presently on a CMI basis.
You'll see one of them out here this afternoon for Amazon. As we're embarking on our new 777 aircraft, continuing to grow our charter and particularly our international. The one aspect I've been questioned and we've been criticized a number of times about growing the ACMI business. Is that a lower margin business than your domestic overnight business? No, it's not. Scott will allude a little bit to that. It produces, on average, a much higher EBITDA margin than our domestic business. The other unique factor that I think what gets missed sometimes is investors and analysts compare our ACMI business to a traditional ACMI business like Atlas or even Morningstar with their aircraft here in Canada that they operate for FedEx.
There's a fundamental difference between Cargojet's ACMI business and some of those other operators in that we operate those aircraft exclusively for one customer on a long-term contract with minimum block hour guarantees per month that we have to operate the aircraft. The aircraft's not exclusive to use. It doesn't sit idle when it's not flying for that particular customer. All of the aircraft in our fleet, whether they're serving the domestic part of our business, our ACMI business or our international business, are all available for charters. That's important to us because not only do we interchange aircraft between ACMI and the domestic business to average out the utilization of the aircraft, but it also provides a bigger fleet of aircraft in our, b igger the number of aircraft in our fleet and we're up to.
You'll see in a further slide where we'll be close to 40 by the end of the year. The bigger geographic footprint where those aircraft are domiciled during the day and on weekends when they're not either operating the domestic network or an ACMI route, are all available for our sales folks to sell on a charter basis. Obviously, we're far more competitive bidding on a charter out of the U.K. coming into Newfoundland if we have an aircraft and crew sitting in the U.K. on the weekend that can do it versus ferrying an aircraft from Hamilton to the U.K. to do the charter from the U.K. to St. John's. We're far more competitive than any of the other ACMI operators that people compare us to.
To say we've succeeded in growing those segments of the business, and I think we've obviously been very successful. We enjoy over 90% market share on the domestic overnight air cargo market today, represented, as I said, by long-term customer contracts, take or pay type agreements with blue chip customers who we provide an unparalleled level of service and on-time performance and reliability, which makes it not only difficult to compete. I would say it makes it impossible to compete with the model that we've built on the domestic side.
We've complemented that with significant growth in our ACMI and CMI business, as I said, with DHL and Amazon respectively, and we continue to grow our international and charter business, especially with the introduction of the 777 aircraft in late 2023, 2024. You know, in a very short period of time, in 10 years, not only have we grown our overall revenues five times, we've improved the mix between the domestic, the ACMI, and the charter international revenue segments. Our domestic revenue over that period has more than tripled. Our ACMI business, particularly with DHL, which we'll talk about the fleet and the CapEx funds, which effectively the DHL agreement underwrote the aircraft growth CapEx plans that we have over the next few years, currently operates 15 dedicated cargo aircraft with commitments for several more over the next few years.
Our international business is just beginning to benefit from the shift in global air cargo away from belly cargo to dedicated freighters, and Cargojet will be well positioned to take advantage of that opportunity. Now here in Hamilton, you'll see or you saw when you drove in, and you may see when you drive out, you know, customers more and more are synchronizing their network strategies with Cargojet's hub, Cargojet's network and their hub here in Canada, specifically here in Ontario, in Hamilton. The two pictures you see up here, Amazon recently opened an 850,000 sq ft fulfillment center they call YHM1, which is just on the west side of the airport. It's been operating since early this year. It's Amazon...
To give you an example, we operate, so for those of you that go to the sort facility this afternoon, you'll see part of the Amazon. One of the benefits of the Amazon ACMI operation, it takes place mostly during the day. We utilize our labor force, our facilities during the day in addition to the nighttime on the overnight network. To give it a scale in the sense of activity that we do with Amazon, presently today, we handle on average, we accept, we process, we scan, we build over 1.8 million packages from Amazon per week in the four facilities, but most of them in Hamilton. In the four facilities that we operate the aircraft, the dedicated ACMI aircraft between Hamilton, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver. Think about that.
Not only does it provide, you know, value-added service to Amazon, but it really ties them in as a customer to us longer term because we're providing that handling, processing, and we do it equally to our on-time performance with our network. Our scanning reliability of those 1.8 million pieces, and I think Derek might touch on this later in our operational excellence presentation, exceeds 97%-98%. That's phenomenal. You know, equally DHL, as Ajay mentioned, invested over CAD 100 million in the Hamilton facility. They were lobbied hard by Toronto and by other politicians to build a facility in Toronto. They made it made sense for them to build the facility right here next to us. You pass it on your way in, the yellow facility, that is their hub in Canada.
It's allowed them, tied them into our domestic network, but it also has provided some incremental revenue opportunities, where now a lot of international flying that we do for DHL comes into Hamilton instead of necessarily going through their super hub in Cincinnati, and then that domestic traffic connects to and from our domestic network across Canada. Equally, UPS and Purolator long ago have longstanding investments in Hamilton and long ago realized the benefit of partnering with Cargojet for their domestic Canadian overnight air cargo requirements. As Ajay mentioned, it's, you know, unique.
Again, another competitive advantage of Cargojet's network is we literally have those customers that have facilities, what we call airside, where those facilities have trucks coming up groundside, they process the volume, build the containers, take them out the back door airside, bring them to our aircraft, are literally tendering their last containers or their last packages within 15 minutes of the scheduled departure time of the flight. Equally on arrival, we're retrieving those packages and giving them those containers at most 15 to 20 minutes after the arrival of the aircraft. Unprecedented. Nobody else in the industry could do that. You know, as we said at the outset, certainly COVID stress-tested Cargojet, and it initially provided some short-term revenue opportunities and gains, the PPE, the vaccines that Ajay talked about.
Our flexibility and commitment to our customers allowed us to pivot quickly and take advantage of those opportunities. Our team was able to provide solutions for all of our customers, whether they were short-term government of Canada PPE charters or longer-term global network solutions for companies like DHL Express. We were able to rapidly build scale that is proving to be very sustainable today. As noted, our domestic network, not only do we have 90% market share. You can put the next one, please. We operate our network. We serve probably 90%-95% of the Canadian population. This is an unparalleled competitive advantage. Nobody can match our reach, our infrastructure, our scale, our commitment to on-time performance and reliable service, or our dedication and unparalleled commitment to our customers. As Ajay said, we are obsessed with customer satisfaction.
You could say, you probably should say, that we're truly in a league of our own. We're building on all of those key elements and opportunities by growing our global international footprint and network in combination with our ACMI charter and international business segments and opportunities. Our current fleet of 34 aircraft, 30 on the cargo side, we have a couple smaller passenger aircraft that we shuttle pilots around on, is the most reliable fleet of dedicated cargo aircraft. There are efficiencies between the 757 and the 767. The simulators that you see here, the aircraft have a common flight deck and cockpit. We have pilots that are. It's very efficient for us from a cost standpoint and an operating standpoint, that a pilot can literally get out of a 757, get into.
He or she can get out of a 757, get into a 767 and fly the next route. Our previously announced fleet expansion certainly remains on track. We're not here to announce any further CapEx plans today. Though our fleet expansion is largely underwritten by our agreements with our customers, we do have risk mitigation options to either defer or cancel up to CAD 150 million in planned aircraft CapEx if required. We also have some additional opportunities with some of the 777s that we've bought the feedstock that we own, that we bought them from Etihad. We own the aircraft. They're still in passenger configuration. We could defer the conversion of those aircraft if situation warranted itself.
Today, you'll hear from further detail from our team on how Cargojet has redefined industry standards, achieved unprecedented market share and customer loyalty, provided and continue to provide unparalleled levels of on-time performance and reliability, and capitalized on significant growth opportunities to provide tremendous shareholder value today and into the future. Thank you very much. With that, I'd like to introduce Scott Calver, our CFO.
Thanks, Jamie, and good morning, everyone. I'd like to start with our financial priorities. Cargojet is focused on five key areas to maintain superior financial performance. In the first column, building long-term relationships with our customers and adding capacity for known demand. For over 20 years, Cargojet has demonstrated that capacity is only added when there is certainty in demand. Increasing the aircraft is not taken lightly. The challenge continues to be keeping up with our customer demands. This has become even more critical now that we have customer ownership with stock warrants that have incentives for additional growth. The second column, adjusted EBITDA expansion. With the growth that Cargojet has experienced and continues to capture, growth is accretive from a quality of earnings perspective. We can continue to capture economies of scale and spread certain fixed costs over increasing revenue.
Block hours per aircraft has increased and more revenue is put through existing facilities. Jamie provided the example with Amazon, and hopefully you'll see it this afternoon, that this business is done off hours. It's not done at our busiest times or at the middle of the night. Again, ad hoc charters is another example of growing revenue with existing assets. The middle column, growing adjusted free cash flow. We have to take a longer-term view with adjusted free cash flow in a time of expansion. A reminder that we define adjusted free cash flow as cash flow from operations, less maintenance, capital expenditures. Our maintenance CapEx is consistent throughout this strategic plan. Our current growth capital campaign will settle in 2026, and more details on this in a few slides. The fourth financial priority will be maintaining a conservative balance sheet.
Cargojet's guiding north star will be maintaining leverage as a goal no higher than two times. It will leap above that from time to time because obviously the capital will impact our debt immediately, and then it takes 12 months to get the EBITDA. Then we have startup costs as well that's factored into that. The fifth priority will be to maintain a disciplined capital approach. The capital allocation is critical in a capital-intensive business like Cargojet. When we commented in the past that growth will be accretive, this also includes accretion based on our return on invested capital. We anticipate that return on invested capital will continue to be strong throughout the strategic plan. I'll also provide more details on our capital allocation in a few slides. 2022 has been a very exciting year for Cargojet.
The DHL partnership is another chapter in the book that included the one slide that Ajay spoke to that showed Canada Post and Purolator in 2014, UPS in 2015, Amazon in 2019, and then Jamie talked about the impact of COVID in 2020. Cargojet's exceptional customer service with greater than 98% on time performance is critical to DHL and for all customers as far as that goes. Again, the stock warrants with incentives for growth creates value for both DHL and the existing Cargojet shareholders. DHL's decision to move away from belly space and passenger aircraft to reliable, dedicated air cargo freighters is a permanent decision. It'll take years for DHL to implement this strategy, and Cargojet will work hard to support them on this initiative. Our growth capital expenditure plan.
The major challenge with this CAD 1.2 billion growth CapEx plan is that we cannot onboard these assets fast enough. The challenge that Jamie spoke to is the waiting queue for these conversion slots. Depending on the type of aircraft, the waiting period can be over three years, and then it takes an additional six months to complete the conversion. Despite the duration for onboarding new capacity, it is prudent to convert used passenger aircraft to air cargo freighters as opposed to purchasing new air cargo aircraft. Both the customer and the shareholder benefit from this approach. In order to maintain and improve our attractive return on invested capital, it is imperative that Cargojet uses this approach, converting passenger aircraft to cargo freighters. Lastly, the work's completed with the support of our lenders.
Cargojet is pleased to have sufficient committed capital available for this strategic plan. Again, with our guiding North Star of leverage peaking out just two times, you can see that we have sufficient dry powder to support various scenarios and options. Our lenders continue to be extremely supportive. I know most of you are in attendance tonight, so again, thank you for your support. An example of their support would be that when we implemented our delayed draw term loan earlier in the year, amendments to the revolving facility included improvements, such as removing additional security under certain circumstances. Cargojet has a track record of growth in cash generation. While it is true that Cargojet was a pandemic winner, as you can see on this slide, the volumes have not gone away.
For the trailing 12 months as of June 30th, 2022, our revenue was CAD 906 million, a nice increase from 2021 and 2020, and our trailing 12-month EBITDA was CAD 326 million. The pandemic only accelerated the use of e-commerce, and it also moved the capacity from belly space and passenger aircraft to dedicated air cargo freighters. Primarily as a result of these two factors, our volumes continue to grow even in times of high inflation like we're currently experiencing. There is no shortage of macro indicators and forecasts that expect this growth in e-commerce to continue for a very long time, and even more so in Canada, as Jamie spoke to, as we as a country lag compared to most countries. The strong cash flow continues to be a key ingredient to support our growth of capital expenditures.
Total shareholder return. Cargojet has delivered superior total shareholder returns for several years. Most recently, the five-year CAGR for our share price increase is just over 19%. You can see on this slide that over 10 years, our share price on average has increased to 32% per annum. On top of this, to get to our total shareholder return, we have our dividends, which we have increased every year throughout this period of time as well, increased on a per share basis. A few words about our liquidity and capital allocation. As mentioned earlier, we'll continue to keep our debt at a conservative level. We have two permitted facilities, a CAD 600 million revolver and a $400 million delayed draw term loan.
The small amount on the revolver that you saw at the end of the second quarter has been rolled over to our delayed draw term loan, and so that's why we're showing $300 million here compared to the $400 million that's available. Our sources of capital, which include cash from operations, debt capital and equity capital, is not any different than any other business. What is different with Cargojet is the amount of low cost capital that is raised from our operations. Our capital allocation priorities continue to be maintenance capital expenditures, accretive growth capital expenditures, debt level management to manage risk and maintain a flexible and low cost for capital, and dividend growth will continue to be a priority. Lastly, we will consider acquisitions. M&A is viewed both strategic and opportunistic here at Cargojet.
Strategically, we may need more companies like 21 Air to help us grow internationally to manage restrictions as a result of the cabotage regulations. Again, cabotage regulations make it illegal for a foreign transportation company to complete an entire trip with the origin and the destination being in that visiting country. The recent DHL award that you saw ramp up in July was made possible partially because of our strategic investment in 21 Air. They help us with the Cincinnati to Miami leg of a triangulated route that ultimately continues on to Brazil. A review of our investment in our fleet that is required to fuel growth. Cargojet has always demonstrated a structured approach to adding capacity for known demand. Risks related to both maintenance capital expenditures and growth capital expenditures has always been mitigated.
You can see from this slide that our fleet additions are front end loaded in our strategic plan, with nine aircraft planned for 2022, four aircraft for 2023, and six aircraft for 2024, and our last 777 arriving in 2026. Jamie spoke earlier about the risk mitigation with the opportunity to cancel some of these if need be. The maintenance capital throughout the strategic plan will average between CAD 140 million and CAD 150 million per annum. Consistent and predictable in a business like Cargojet. The growth CapEx on this slide is consistent to what we communicated earlier in the year, the CAD 1.2 billion growth CapEx plan. We have ranges by year allowing for delivery timing issues, otherwise nothing has changed.
The long-term financial outlook, which I know a lot of you, that's why you're here today, and some of you saw the press release already. Really what we'd like to do is share with you management's view on how we see the results start to normalize towards the end of our strategic plan. We see annualized revenue in 2026 being in the range of CAD 1.3 billion-CAD 1.4 billion. Our 2026 adjusted EBITDA is expected to continue to be greater than 35% of revenue in a range of CAD 500 million-CAD 550 million. Our range for adjusted free cash flow in 2026 is anticipated to be between CAD 320 million and CAD 360 million.
Cargojet is never growing top-line revenue for the sake of growing revenue. As we said in the past, our growth will be accretive. To reiterate, appreciation is also measured by return on invested capital. Some investment highlights. I can go quickly over this slide, Pauline, because Ajay and Jamie have done a great deal, a great job here. As Pauline said, becoming a leader in the Canadian domestic overnight cargo is a direct result of the entire team's passion for exceptional customer service. The entire workforce puts our customers first. The pride each night you really have to be here between 1:00 A.M. to 1:30 A.M. to see how much pride these folks take in winning. Winning is measured by safely executing on pretty much perfect customer service above that 98% on-time delivery.
The second highlight, e-commerce will continue to grow at attractive compound annual growth rates for years, if not decades. We believe that this will help mitigate the risk of any potential recession. Strategic long-term relationships. I'm somewhat fortunate because I've been on both sides of the fence. For four years between 2004 and 2008, I worked in the small package and courier division at TransForce, and Cargojet was our largest vendor by far. Our entire organization relied on Cargojet, because nearly everything was shipped with an overnight guarantee across Canada. It was very rare that we were disappointed with a service failure. You could count on one hand probably how many times it happened over a four-year period.
I've been able to experience on the customer side of it, and now I've been with the company for four years, and I'm starting to see how they make this happen. It's been a very interesting four months, to say the least. Long-term customer contracts. With the vast majority of Cargojet's revenue being secured by long-term contracts with volume guarantees and pass-through provisions on several cost drivers, earnings are stable and predictable. The other 25% of the revenue is attractive business to Cargojet. This 25% allows us to manage surge volumes with our existing customers, plus it also gives us enough critical mass to be able to maximize capacity on those days that these customers do not bring the volumes that they've guaranteed to bring to us. It adds to the business. It's accretive.
It is not a risk to the business. The fifth investment highlight. High margins and free cash flow generation are exactly what you'd expect in a business with such a strong competitive advantage like Cargojet. The sixth bullet, we have multiple levers to support growth. We are no longer lacking diversification with an overweighting on the domestic business. As Jamie spoke to, both ACI and ACMI are growing rapidly, and this is growing with longer-haul international business. As we increase our fleet count, the aircraft that are temporarily parked at different locations around the world are all in charters continue to grow. Lastly, our valuation. Nearly all of our analysts support an attractive valuation when they look at our enterprise value over our EBITDA. Nearly all of our analysts have a targeted multiplier between 10x and 13.5x.
Our analysts understand the uniqueness of our business model and how the risks have been mitigated as they relate to pricing, volume, and capital expenditures. It is difficult to value a company like Cargojet, primarily because we do not have any peers. Passenger airlines are not a peer for far too many reasons to list here today. Given the competitiveness, operating ratios, and the returns on invested capital, trucking is not a good peer. Over time, what we need to do is continue to demonstrate that our revenue growth and our growth in adjusted free cash flow, that we are deserving of the evaluations that our analysts are promoting. With that, thank you, everyone, and it's time for a coffee break. Thank you.
Excuse me. May I have your attention please? We'll resume in five minutes. We'll resume the second part of the session in five minutes. Thank you very much.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome back from the coffee break. My name is Vito Cerone. I am the Senior Vice President, International and Customer Engagement. I'm excited today because I'd like to share with you our international game plan and also how Cargojet will redefine the industry standards as far as global air shipping is concerned. Yes, we'll continue to be innovators and also somewhat disruptors in order to ensure that our customers get the customer experience that they expect. Before I go through the strategic priorities, I'd just like to go back, as you heard this morning from Ajay and Jamie and in the video. During the past 20 years, Cargojet built a foundation and a winning formula for success. We're gonna use some of these components of the winning formula for success for our international growth.
Our people who are highly motivated, highly qualified. Like was mentioned earlier, all we know is cargo and freighters. That's all we know. Our international experience with the ACMI that we operate for our partners DHL globally, our international charters which we've operated, and we continue operating internationally. For those international schedules that we operate into Europe and into the Caribbean. Our experience is immense, and with that and our focus on profitability, I think will lay the foundation for us to extend our international footprint. Our winning formula really is gonna consist of three key strategic priorities: global expansion, the 777 fleet, and the charter program. As far as the global expansion is concerned, our first key priority will be to bring the Cargojet brand to the international stage.
Cargojet is well known in Canada and in North America, and with our key customers that we currently work with today, global customers such as the DHL Global Forwarding, [Purolator], the [Nippon Express], the OCS Flying Fresh, just to mention a few, we'll work jointly with them to promote our brand on the international stage. Also, we need to leverage Canada, our geographic location. We are so strategically located that it will enable us to offer the global trading partners rapid transit time and also allow them to trade easier between an Asia, U.S., Asia, South America, Europe, India to South America. We have the connectivity in our network. Let's not forget our trading partner down south. There's three key catchment areas that will support both our import and our export on these, international expansion.
There's the Midwest, Chicago, all the way down through the Ohio Valley, Northeastern U.S.A., and the West Seattle, Portland. They will all support both the import and export for these, for this international. Next, let's also point three is our airline partners we have today. We have over 50 interline partners that we work with today. Working with them, we'll be able to extend our reach beyond those destinations that we're gonna operate O&D. We expect to have over 100 cities that we'll be able to easily service on the international front. We'll build a global charter network, which was mentioned earlier. Finally, there's going to be a digital transformation that we're gonna work on as well and become a data-driven organization.
In the digital front, we're gonna work with channels of distribution within the industry to reach our customers more effectively and to communicate with them. The 777 fleet, I won't go over these points, but there is a short-term lag as far as capacity is concerned, and the 777 will be the next workhorse. It has 110 tons capacity. It can fly versus a 747, 12%-15% longer range. It's 15%-20% more fuel efficient than a 747, and it's 30% better on the capacity front. This will help us diversify our revenue. It will help us, number one, enter new markets.
Number two, the product stream, such as military equipment, horse races, and other types of products that we cannot carry today, open all these new opportunities for us moving forward. Of course, the charter program, as was alluded by both Ajay and Jamie earlier today. There's great opportunity streams that we'll have through the charter programs. We'll be able to operate these aircraft when they don't work our scheduled flights and on during the downtime. I'd like to conclude really with one message as far as the international growth is concerned. We have three key unique selling points our people, our geographical location, and our fleet, both the 777 and the 767 .
In conclusion, what I'd like to say from an international growth perspective, we have the cargo culture, we have the cargo pedigree, and we're going to redefine the way cargo is shipped globally. Thank you very much. I'd like to introduce you to our next speaker, Gord Johnston, our Senior Vice President, Strategic Partnerships. Thank you.
Guess not. Good. Can everybody hear me? Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us today. My name is Gord Johnston. I'm the Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at Cargojet. I'm excited to be here today to share with you three of our key priorities in the strategic partnership department. You heard some of the comments made by Ajay and Jamie earlier. Some of these I'm gonna be reviewing, but there are three key pillars in our portfolio I would like to review with you today. Our ACMI or wet lease business unit, our strategic sales initiatives, and our ability to unlock value in our airline network and infrastructure.
First, I'd like to start with our ACMI business, which you've heard a lot about, that term today. It's also commonly referred to as a wet lease, and is one of the fastest-growing segments of our business. This is where global customers turn to third-party aircraft providers for dedicated capacity in a desired network. That's essentially what it is. This business segment accelerated rapidly during the pandemic as Ajay spoke. As a result of passenger belly cargo carriers withdrawing service to many markets and suspending operations, some indefinitely. DHL, for example, one of our largest growing and fastest growing customers, relied heavily on the passenger operators for capacity and quickly realized this model just wasn't sustainable in the long term. In fact, they got burnt.
They told us, after the pandemic and as things returned to normal, that the use of passenger carriers after the pandemic is not an option going forward and would only be a spot buy at best. They appreciated the fact that Cargojet stepped up during this time to provide dedicated wide-body capacity to fill the voids left by these carriers as Ajay mentioned. We freed up between eight and 10 aircraft in our fleet. We rejigged our network, so that we could actually supply this for them, and I can assure you they will never forget what we did for them in their time of need. This translated into more dedicated routes, as you've seen from some of the financials that Scott shared, and we are just getting started.
Y'all, I know you all passed the big yellow building across the street to attend today. I don't know how you could have missed it, but it's a big yellow building out there. We spent many years trying to convince DHL to turn that into an air hub for a number of different reasons. The first and foremost is it's a cargo-friendly airport, Hamilton is. It's not curfewed. It's a great labor market. In addition to having direct access to a company like Cargojet, who can extend their reach both domestically and internationally.
After they did their due diligence and after they did the research, they invested well over CAD 100 million into a state-of-the-art facility, and they re-began increasing their international route network, their domestic network, and intermingling, which is something new we found, we discovered last year, intermingling their ACMI operations into the Cargojet network, which further enhances what we provide. The results have been nothing less than exceptional. Our relationship with DHL has allowed us to increase block hours to new destinations, expand our global footprint, and enhances our international presence, as Vito alluded to. Cargojet now services Europe, the U.K., Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Japan, and China, in addition to our transporter operations. I'm happy to say that we now have 15 dedicated aircraft on 12 international routes, and these are gonna continue to grow into the future.
Our success in this area is directly attributed to our ability to provide flexibility for our customers and the ability to scale up during peak season demand. The next pillar that's equally important is our strategic sales initiatives. Our time-sensitive overnight air cargo network is the cornerstone of our business. As Jamie alluded to, this is where we started over 20 years ago from a domestic overnight co-load network. From our humble beginnings with a handful of Boeing 727 aircraft to the global network we have today in 20 short years is nothing short of amazing. We redefined industry standards by providing superior service. That takes a team of dedicated professionals, including our maintenance team, who delivers an exceptional reliability every day.
You'll hear from my colleague, Paul Rinaldo, later on today about some of the things that he's doing in his shop, but our maintenance department is second to none. Our flight operations and crew scheduling, who always go above and beyond to develop creative solutions. Not to forget, our commercial operations team define what it means to be customer-centric. We've also built a very strong portfolio of diverse customers who we're extremely proud to partner with. We maintain strategic account relationships to ensure 100% retention. Many of our contract customers who participate in our network today have been with us for over 20 years, and in fact, we are proud to say that we have never lost a customer, and we've always renewed or extended current existing agreements.
75% of Cargojet's overnight air cargo business is contracted by our customers in return for guaranteed space on our aircraft. The remaining 25% of our capacity allows our customers to grow and scale up during high demand periods, as well as provide presale opportunities for our sales teams to develop other programs such as e-commerce. We work closely with our strategic business partners to unlock additional network value, both domestically and internationally. We've also identified capacity opportunities utilizing idle aircraft during the day for our blue chip customers and our sales organization itself. Jamie and Ajay alluded to that as well. We pride ourselves in the ability to understand our customer's business needs by meeting with them regularly, and with them at various departments, including their sales and marketing departments, to unlock value and enhance the growth.
It's important for us to understand what their business is doing, what direction they're going in before we can actually tailor-make a solution. This includes conducting quarterly business reviews as well as a weekly cadence touch points to improve communication, enhance network opportunities. I can tell you that all our customers, our corporate customers, we have corporately aligned business goals, strategies and then ultimately the end result. Our third and now becoming a very important part of our pillar and our strategy is unlocking additional value. Can you go back for a second? As we all know, Jamie and Ajay alluded to it earlier, Canada suffers from a trade imbalance. Our business tends to be very heavily centered east to west in traffic flows.
We are highly skilled at providing capacity opportunities with our Asian and European business partners. This allows them to promote interline opportunities to extend their networks and provide volume on light flight segments. We also unlock value in our airline business unit. We promote our first class maintenance organization, as I mentioned, to provide support for all strategic aviation business partners. That includes DHL and UPS. They both use us extensively across the country and internationally as well. Seven years ago, we made a strategic decision to insource our ramp handling operations right across the country at a rather significant investment. This was to insulate ourselves and provide resiliency to Cargojet, as well as not to have to rely on third-party providers who can cause disruptions to our business.
We now provide full service ground support and repair services for all our customers, and we find this to be an extension of their business, thereby unlocking synergies within the collective organizations. We provide coast-to-coast freight general sales support for strategic partnerships. As Vito pointed out, we now represent DHL Express across Canada by filling their flights with additional sources of revenue promoted by our sales teams across the network, primarily internationally. Again, basically in closing, folks, I just want to tell you, I am proud to be part of this winning team. We have built a very diverse business model that is sustainable, flexible, innovative, and above all, customer-centric. This is the very essence of who we are. Thank you. Again, I'd like to welcome you.
Please welcome George Sugar, our Senior Vice President of Regulatory Compliance. Go ahead, George.
Always an afterthought, right? Thank you very much, Gord. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us this morning. We appreciate you coming out to visit. Gord spoke of diversity. Another form of diversity that is becoming increasingly prominent these days, of course, are diversity under ESG programs that have emerged as increasingly important both from an institutional investor and a retail investor point of view, and also has become increasingly mandated now by various forms of governments and indirectly mandated by financial institutions when considering new financing and debt. It's a recent development, but the implementation of ESG is really an important thing, and it's because it's the right thing to do, and also it's a good business practice. It's good to be shepherds for our climate. It's good to serve our community through various outreach programs and charities. It's good for our stakeholders.
As a result, it's good for our business. When we're operating efficiently, we have an engaged and compassionate workforce, and when we have a high level of compliance and regulatory framework, then that can only add value to our business and add value to the shareholders that have a part of our business. At Cargojet, we're not new to these practices. We've been focusing on DEI and many facets of ESG since our inception. We have long-established communication and training programs for our employees and for our executives, and we frequently run campaigns and provide opportunities for growth and equality of opportunity for our employees, and we maintain our community outreach.
The board and the executive are all well engaged in these practices, and they also have it as a priority as opposed to just being an add-on that we must do. We have a strong code of ethics, and we have many effective corporate policies that we follow very stringently. A big part of ESG, of course, is the environment and our emissions programs. Once again, the board is very engaged. I recently made a presentation at our board of directors meeting, and there were some well-informed questions that were asked, and a great level of detail was sought by the board. With an informed group like we have here today, it's not necessary to go through the details of these various letters and acronyms and programs out there.
No doubt you're already familiar with them, so I'll spare you the detail, and we won't turn this into a training session. What I will do is tell you what it is that we're doing along these lines and the progress that we're making. As you can likely appreciate, carbon emissions are a very significant factor when we're talking about a company that operates airframes and operates an air cargo business. Absent any significant changes or substitutions in fuel or propulsion systems, our expansion and our future growth depends on increased consumption of fossil fuels. Therefore, since we can't really reduce absolute emissions, as is required in some cases, we are working on the other approved methodology of reducing our intensity. We're using the sector decarbonization approach that's advocated under the UN Global Compact under SBTi.
The metrics that we use for this are fuel burn per hour, which is a bit of an obvious one. More important, we also use fuel burn per hour per ton of payload and directly emissions per ton of payload. This becomes our efficiency metric and allows us to reduce our intensity with our present technology, with our present fuel sources that we have. As has been discussed before, the introduction of the 777 , the Boeing 777, is also part of a very important reduction of our carbon intensity, since that'll allow us to carry more payload for less fuel per pound per hour, over a greater distance. This is a big part of our short-term goal under the SBTi program.
We're looking at a short-term goal, yet to be certified of something in the order of magnitude of a 25% improvement in our intensity. As you're aware, to go through the SBTi program, we have to have a very extensive carbon inventory, and that is currently underway, considering all of our emissions sources and other environmental factors. As well for the CDP program, which we've completed the reporting for this year, an important inventory was undertaken for that, and that will be refined and improved for next year. Part of the SBTi program is a commitment to net zero by 2050, and we will be reaching that with obvious technologies and methods that haven't yet been brought to the market.
However, we do have a plan to reach net zero by 2050 through principally the use of sustainable aviation fuels or SAF, through carbon offsets, new technologies, and other operational efficiencies, which we have been introducing, for some years now. It should be kept in mind that ESG is not something that we've just come to. We've been doing it for quite some time. We've been participating in reporting and offsetting programs since 2019. Being an efficient, dynamic company, we've also been striving for operational efficiencies throughout, so it's not something that's new for us. We're a founding member of the Sustainable Aviation Fuels Council in Canada that was recently announced this year.
We'll be undertaking the programs in cooperation with the various levels of government and fuel suppliers and other airlines to achieve a significant and substantial substitution of new fossil fuels with sustainable aviation fuel. However, our starting point for that is another challenge that we will overcome over time. The sustainable aviation fuel only provides currently about 1% of the availability of requirements for the airline industry, and the unit cost is about 10% more than traditional fossil fuels. We still have a lot of work to do in that regard, but there's a large and considered effort at all levels of government and in industry to make that happen.
Of course, there'll also be new technologies such as hydrogen and electric power that will come on, but for the moment, those are not commercially viable and not widely available for the scale and distance that an air cargo carrier requires. Another thing that has come up and become more prominent is TCFD, which is more of an all-encompassing type of program that's been put forward on a risk basis. The four thematic areas for TCFD are governance, strategy, risk management, and metrics. As we've already demonstrated, both with our past record, we have a demonstrated record of success in all of these areas, and we'll bring those strengths to bear on our emissions program and the identification of risks and providing future mitigation. These programs are currently either under review for certification and submission, or they're just being formulated.
Some of the processes are much more extensive than others, but we are moving forward. Thank you very much for your kind attention. I appreciate you coming out once again. We'll be available for questions or any comments afterwards. For now, I'd like to invite our Senior Vice President of Maintenance and Engineering, Paul Rinaldo, to the stage. Thank you very much.
Thank you, George. Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. My name is Paul Rinaldo, and as George politely introduced me, I'm the Senior Vice President of Maintenance and Engineering for Cargojet. Today, I will outline a number of capabilities, certifications, and resources that Cargojet has. Cargojet's maintenance and engineering, our focus is dispatch reliability and on-time performance. As Ajay has said, it's all about that last minute, it's all about that last mile. Our engineering team includes a dedicated, highly skilled workforce of technicians and support staff. We are considered to be the best in the industry. We have redefined the maintenance industry standard, and we focus on continuous improvement. We actually focus on that on a monthly basis.
Over the past decade, Cargojet underwent a transformation and took a series of strategic foundational measures to strengthen and streamline our activities, including building our resources to support the growth and the anticipation of where we're going next. Our key capacities include fleet management. These are all things that we do in-house and have brought in-house, so we don't depend on other agencies or other suppliers. Engineering capabilities, aircraft modifications, regulatory compliance, heavy maintenance capabilities, bringing that in-house. That's just what we do every 24 months. We take the airplane in and it's overhauled and it's brought back. Cargojet has the ability to do that themselves. Again, we don't have to rely on outside sources. Line maintenance capabilities across the network. We have people, tools, equipment, and parts in every station. That supports our on-time performance and our dispatch reliability. Technical quality assurance.
We have a team of quality assurance specialists, and their job is to ensure that we are best in the business, and we meet Transport Canada's regulations, and we keep a safe and running airline. Our certifications. We're a 705 operator, and we're also an approved AMO. Our certification is a number of Airbus aircraft and also the 757, the Boeing 757, 767. Right now we're working on the 777 aircraft for our future. I wanted to talk a little bit about ETOPS. ETOPS is Extended-range Twin-engine Operations over the Atlantic. What we are approved for, and this is things that you have to certify your aircraft for, and it brings the reliability of the aircraft to a higher level. We maintain the equipment at that higher standard as well.
We're certified for 180 minutes as we cross the Atlantic, which is the highest rating for the Boeing 767-300. We're also a CAT III all-weather landing as a company as well. This is another certificate that we have achieved, again, by increasing the reliability of our components and proving to Transport Canada that we have the ability to do so. This for our flight crew gives them the ability to fly and land in adverse weather within 1 inch of the centerline of the runway. This is actually fantastic stuff. We're an IATA and Transport Canada certified member. We are audited to those standards every two years, and we do internal audits every year. Again, aircraft structures and composite repair in-house. We don't have to rely on those other people, that supply chain.
We can repair those rudders and ailerons and flaps in-house. Cargojet performs line maintenance, A and B type checks. Also, we are certified for the heavy maintenance, as I mentioned before. We have 250 aircraft licensed technicians in this country. We also have sheet metal and avionics specialists and support staff, all the engineering group. We have flight technicians that fly without aircraft to certain destinations to support the return of the aircraft on a timely basis. We have a number of stations across the country, and we put CAD 60 million worth of parts dispersed across the country to support those aircraft and that on-time departure. We also have preload kits that we put in every aircraft, and that supports that on-time departure at each station. Next one. I'd like to bring your attention to this slide.
It's something that we're very proud of in the maintenance and engineering world. As you can see, our combined dispatch reliability is 99.28%. We compare ourselves with other competitors. Competitors like Atlas , ABX, U.S. operators, UPS, FedEx. As you can see, what I can tell you is over the last five years, we've been the top of the heap. What we do with our dispatch reliability is we analyze every component and we see what we can do with the OEMs to increase that on wing time. That's a cost factor, and it's also a reliability factor. As Cargojet continues to grow and prosper, the maintenance and engineering team proactively strives to exceed our high standards of aircraft dispatch reliability and on-time performance for our customers. Thank you very much.
I'd like to introduce Mr. Brent Card . He's our Senior Vice President of Flight Operations.
Thank you very much, Paul. It's a pleasure to be here with everybody today, and I'm gonna talk to you about the three different areas of my responsibility within the Flight Operations department. The first one that I'll speak about is the pilot group themselves. I'll also touch on our crew resource management team. Then finally, we'll speak a little bit about flight dispatch. Everybody's heard a lot of things about pilots probably over the last little while. Probably the biggest thing is where do you find them? As the COVID pandemic has rebounded, it's really put a lot of light on how difficult it is to get these people back quickly, especially to the passenger airlines, and get them trained up. That's what one of our biggest challenges has been, is to be able to keep up.
One of the ways that we've been able to do that, I think, is really a shift in how people think about things when you are an actual airline pilot. We heard a lot of our other speakers talking about our customers not looking to passenger airlines for belly lift and looking for a different solution moving forward. I'll be honest, the pilots are also that way as well. They've been through the upheavals of 9/11. They've been through the upheavals of the economic crisis, 2008, 2009. Now with COVID, they've also seen their lifeblood, everything that they do, you know, unserved, laid off, at home and wishing to get back into the air.
We've been able to harness a lot of things here at Cargojet to be able to get the right people in the door and people that actually want to be here. It used to be different. A cargo pilot was seen slightly differently, but nowadays we're actually the place where people want to come. They see the stability, they see the vision, they see the global expansion, they see the aircraft. That's one of the ways that we're able to actually better support the business and the expansion, is by making sure that we have not only pilots through the door, but the right pilots through the door. Our recruitment efforts have been ongoing, and it's much, much easier for us compared to a lot of the other companies, and that's a testament to what's been built here.
I'm gonna speak a little bit more about training as we get into the simulator here in a little bit, but it's really important for us to ensure that we're being as efficient and doing the best job that we can with our pilots to ensure a safe product and also an on-time product. We take great pride to not only create safe pilots at Cargojet, but we also look at operational excellence. How do we get them involved and making sure that these airplanes are on time as well as flying safely? A big part of flight operations clearly is compliance with regulatory and inside and outside audits. You know, we are an IOSA carrier.
There's a lot of scrutiny put on us, and I have a great management team in place to ensure that we are compliant from a regulatory standpoint, and our safety speaks for itself. Talking a little bit about crew planning and crew scheduling, I think that almost everybody asks me, you know, "Do pilots fly the same routes? How does that work? Do they bid for their schedules? Do they always go to the same place?" I just want to explain really quickly how that kind of works, because it is a huge thing that we take a lot of pride in. Basically, we have a commercial schedule that is put together with all of our customer requirements. It's provided to my crew planning team, who takes all of these flights, and they mesh them all together to create what's called pairings.
These pairings are a series of flights which could be two, three, even nine, 10, or 11 days long. What we do is we try to take all those flight times and all of those crew duty rest regulations, and we weave them together to create the most efficient pairings to get the most output from the pilots in the least amount of days of work. It's not just, "I'm gonna fly the Heathrow route," or, "I'm gonna fly the Brazil route." They have a seniority-based bidding system, and they bid on these pairings that have been put together very, very carefully from an efficiency and safety standpoint. Our crew scheduling department, they deal with all of the day-of issues, and of course, there are plenty. We're coming out of, you know, the COVID pandemic.
Proud to say that our crew scheduling department and our dedicated pilot group, we had no cancellations during COVID. We have not left a flight on the ground, because of a lack of crew. That's really important for everybody to be able to understand. We saw the damage that was done in the U.S. and even partially here in Canada with the summer travel season. It wasn't all just the airports. It was a lack of pilots. It was a lack of trained people to be able to get the airplanes from A to B. We're really, really pleased that we're always able to stay on top of that.
In addition, our charters come up last minute, and our crew scheduling department is able to work with our pilots and be able to get those flights staffed at short notice so that no revenue's left on the ground. Finally, our flight dispatch department, just over on this side. Some of you will get to be able to see this. It's very exciting. There's lots of fancy computer screens, and it looks like something that we're gonna start launching satellites into orbit from. Really there's two things that a flight dispatcher does for us. They do our operational flight plan and weather determinations to create the flight plans for the routings for the pilots to fly.
This takes into account not only the weather, fuel optimization, payload constraints, and making sure that we're actually being as responsible as we possibly can with carbon emissions and fuel. The bigger part for a flight dispatcher though, is to ensure that the pilots are going where they need to, and that they are aware of things that are changing up ahead of them. We have great systems in the Boeing 757, 767, but the equipment that you'll see over there from a weather standpoint does an amazing job. There's a lot of communication, even while the flight's in the air. If there are changes to the routing, how can we be more efficient? We do these things on the fly.
Having said all those things, I'm just gonna go to the next slide here, and we'll just talk a little bit about how the flight operations department has met the customer requirements over the last several years. You can see back in 2018, we had a total of 160 pilots on staff. As of today, we have 371, and that's been scaled up appropriately with the requirements of the business and the customer. It could be that by next summer, we're looking at up to 500 pilots that are gonna be on staff, and that's a significant flex up for us. But one of the ways that we're gonna be able to do that is on the next slide, and I'll speak a little bit here to our new flight simulator.
The flight simulator is huge for us. It provides us a lot of operational flexibilities and efficiencies, but the biggest thing that it really does is it gives us control over the training of our own pilots. We no longer have to rely on a third-party vendor for sim training and to use their instructors. We're bringing everything in-house. What we're gonna save by doing this is all of those airfares down to Miami, all of those outside third-party instructors that cost a lot more than our own. We're gonna save the hotels, the per diems, and the actual cost of the simulator. You know, we're gonna be saving a couple million dollars a year just by bringing this thing in-house, and it's gonna give us a much better opportunity to be able to train our pilots how we want to have that done.
In closing, I just, you know, I hope to see some people around in the next little bit. I know there's oftentimes questions about flying and pilots, and if I can answer anything, I'd love to have a quick chat with you about how we support the business, our customers, and our shareholders. Thank you very much. Up next is Derek Palmer. He's our Vice President of Transformation and Operational Excellence.
Thank you, Brent. Good morning, everybody. It's a pleasure to be with all of you today and speak a little bit about operational excellence. I'm very excited to share about this program. You can flip the slide. Sorry. As Jamie talked about earlier, our team delivers, handles, sorts, scans millions of packages every week for our customers on time and better than the competition. Our operational excellence strategy is really to elevate that and let us continue forward with delivering ordinary items extraordinarily for our customers. In fact, I'm proud to say this year we've reduced our ground delays by over 50% in the past 12 months, and we continue to aspire to deliver 99% and above around all destinations that we fly to.
On the ground, we continue to focus on four operational pillars. People. People are our most important asset, and that is first and priority. Processes. Again, scanning, sorting, loading aircraft. It's a lot of processes, and we have to deliver it safely and reliably every day for our customers. Equipment and technology enable us to have that reliability, as Paul talked about. We have implemented new workforce planning tools to help optimize and improve our productivity while maintaining our world-class on-time performance. We've adopted mobile and digital technology to help us reduce costs, save time, and reduce errors when we load aircraft each and every day. Finally, we have deployed scanning and Bluetooth technology to help improve the utilization of our assets. This includes ULDs that go on the aircraft and as well as the aircraft as a whole.
This will provide visibility throughout the supply chain as we integrate this technology for our customers, so they know exactly where their shipment is and that we deliver it reliably every day. Another priority is safety and employee engagement. As we continue to grow our network, we build on our safety culture that has been a foundation of Cargojet for over 20 years. We have clear safety rules, procedures, and a strong commitment from all team members for our safety management system. Employee engagement and continuous learning are key priorities. We continue to invest in our people and build a high performance team that can deliver on the diversified products and services that we offer across the ground operations. From a management system, we are investing in new tools and methodologies and an overarching management operating system to make sure that we are consistent in all our locations globally.
Finally, we have embraced a relentless focus on process and operational excellence to drive continuous improvement. We have added industrial engineers to help us reengineer and optimize workflow and bring best practices to each and every operation. We focus on reducing waste and defects through Lean Six Sigma and continuous improvement methodologies with our employees hand in hand to make their job easier to deliver for our customers. In summary, operational excellence really is about empowering our employees, investing in them, in their training, their development.
Have a relentless focus on process excellence, which will allow us to continue to elevate our world-class performance and surpass our customers' expectations. As Ajay remarked in the video today, minutes matter, and our ground operations teams plays an integral part of this execution each and every night. I'm proud to say we've built a high performance team, and with the addition of operational excellence in our remit, we continue to be competitive, safe, reliable, and on time. Thank you. At this time, I'd like to call on Jamie Porteous, our Chief Strategy Officer, for closing remarks.
Thanks, Derek, we'll get back on time quickly. Just wanna appreciate everybody's patience and thank you for listening to the team and thank the team particularly for presenting. I think one of the common themes I hope you saw over that, not just the depth of experience and infrastructure, but each of the elements and each of the parts of our organization have, but their singular focus on customer performance and on-time reliability. Certainly, as it says here in our closing remarks, we've created a unique culture that's obsessed with customer satisfaction. I think you saw that demonstrated by the presentations today. In our short 20-year journey, we've firmly established Cargojet as a leader in the air cargo industry here in Canada and abroad.
We've proven to be or proven to some of the biggest brands globally on the planet that we can deliver real value. You know, we set out, as Ajay said, back in our early days, the number one customer we wanted to get off of their dedicated network was UPS. We achieved that. Then we said, let's get Purolator and Canada Post. We convinced them, then Amazon. Here we are today continuing to grow that brand globally. As I indicated, our customers are continuously investing and synchronizing their sort centers close to our Hamilton hub, creating long-term loyalty and stickiness with the business. Despite the recent market turn down, we've delivered over 32% compound annual share price returns to shareholders, and we are truly a Canadian public company success story. We're mindful of the emerging macro risks, as we noted, and we're steering the company accordingly.
We have a risk mitigation strategy in place and on-ramps to adjust the timing of our fleet expansion and CapEx expenditures over the next several years. We've endured two economic downturns at our start, as Ajay noted, in 2001 and the economic downturn in 2008, and we've successfully grown our business during both of those periods. We remain extremely confident in our ability to continue to create and provide long-term shareholder value. Thank you again for attending our Inaugural Investor Day. We're very, very pleased to showcase our leadership team and our facilities, and we're truly in a league of our own. Thank you, and I'd like to ask Ajay and Scott to join me on stage, and we'd be happy to answer any questions anybody may have. Hard to see. You have a question, Walter?
Hi, it's Walter Spracklin, RBC. Atlas Air just announced a ACMI contract with MSC, and that, you know, that being an ocean liner company, it seems like it's a new area of potential opportunity for air cargo companies like Cargojet. Is that something that's worth considering for your business to start looking at, you know, perhaps avenues you haven't looked into before, including, you know, not only ocean liner, but could that parlay into rail as well in terms of these type of partnerships?
Yeah. We have had some inquiries and discussions with certain ocean liners who wanna get into the air cargo business. They're sitting on a lot of cash on their balance sheets. All these ocean liners for the past two years, as you know, they've made a lot of money with the COVID situation, and they wanna diversify and get into the air cargo business. I think the key thing for us is that we don't wanna take on anything that is going to be not fitting in with our current customer requirements. If we had an extra capacity of pilots or extra planes, I would rather have it with Amazon and DHL that have supported us for years, and we can't even right now come to.
Like, if I had three more planes today ready, we would be deploying them with the customers that we have currently. You know, some of the stuff that these ocean liners are doing, you know, it certainly shows that there is growth opportunities in the air cargo business. They all wanna get into it. I think past 25, 26, if there is an opportunity, we would certainly entertain it, because we have eight 777s committed, and if we can obviously back out of two, at least if the market turns. If the market is good, we might have an opportunity to place at least two of them with some of these opportunities beyond 2026.
Great. Thank you, Ajay.
Konark. Thank you. Yeah.
Some of them don't have the ability to kind of, you know, catch up with the inflation that we are seeing right now. Obviously, it's running 7%-8%. Any repricing opportunity for existing contracts before they expire, or it's the only opportunity when you re-sign or renew those contracts? Thanks.
I think the key thing is that, sure, we are under this 7%, 8%. If you read any literature, everybody is guiding people that don't negotiate any, certainly labor contracts at those numbers, because this is not the norm. You know, we recognize some of the customers have, you know, CPA types of CPI types of increases that are much below 7% or 8% and which are kind of normal, you know, 2%, 3%, 4% ranges. I think it's very difficult to go out to the market and get an 8% increase from a customer because we don't know what that increase is going to be a year from now or three months from now. This is where, you know, finding operational efficiencies in-house comes into play.
If you look at the simulator thing, it's, you know, an investment that we made is gonna save us CAD 4 million. We're rejigging the network domestically. We're doing extra revenue opportunities in ground handling. Like for example, we ground handle, it's almost like a CAD 10 million revenue for us, for outside companies that bring their planes into Canada. We're doing maintenance for UPS, Atlas and a few others that require maintenance in Canada. We are looking at, you know, it's not always that you get this increase and you burden your customer and you know you recognize that the customer can only pass on certain number of percentages to their customers. I think the key thing for us is the difference is that we recognize that our customers have an issue.
If I go to them at 8%, can they go to their customers and get 8%, which is tough. I don't think there's an opportunity that we are going to have where we're gonna have every contract at 8%. I think what we have as a company is a discipline to find efficiency, and we look at our whole cost structure and what savings. To give you an example, we have another probably 50 pilots that fly into Cincinnati once a week, coming back and forth, or Miami, where we do South American flights. We invested in two Beechcraft 1900 aircraft, which is very cheap to operate. It has got 19 seats. We were able to get it from a company that's no longer in business.
We refurbished the whole thing, and now we fly our own crew, which is saving us tons of airline costs, hotel rooms and crew days. You know, there's always room to improve internally, and I think that's what our focus has been. This also gives us long-term loyalty with the customer. Now, if this 8% trend is forever and we see next year it's happening and year after that it's happening or all trends are bad, then obviously we'll go at it. We don't wanna react to a knee-jerk thing in the short term.
Hi, this is right here. Hi, Ajay. Ajay, Mike Andlauer, Bulldog Capital.
Uh-huh.
I'm not only an investor, but I'm also a customer and a very satisfied customer. Personally, I believe that your only competition really is bad service. Your focus on your employees and your pilots, I think is the right one going forward. Obviously, what's the expression? Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Air Canada is now putting in, I guess, getting to the cargo business, a dedicated cargo business, putting in 10 767 freighters and cargo freighters and a couple of 777s they've announced. How do you deal with this extra capacity?
I think, from anything from the presentations, you get that our models are very, very different. For three months, you know, we had every Air Canada customer wanting to convert us to Cargojet customers because of, you know, they've been taking resources and putting it in the passenger side or the baggage side. Minutes matter in this case. If you look at the major customers that make up 90% of the domestic market, whether it's UPS, Purolator, Amazon, Andlauer, yourself, TransForce. When you look at all these customers, Purolator, you know, they are all built around here next door. We are next door to each other. We operate out of Hamilton. There is no way that all these customers are gonna take their product and go back to Toronto Airport.
Toronto Airport has also curfew restrictions after 12:00 A.M. Hard to get permissions to land before 6:00 A.M. and between 12:00 A.M. Working out of Toronto Airport with Air Canada, differential is on service, right, and the network. We cover 16 cities. We have a network that, you know, give it to us in Newfoundland at 7:00 P.M., and it'll be in Vancouver before 5:00 A.M. The connectivity, the whole, we have 6,000 pieces of ground support equipment that support our operation. I think the key thing that we wanna differentiate ourselves is on the service. Now, the 10 freighters that they got, certainly they're not from what we understand from the market, that this is not...
To give you an example, they started a service to Madrid, stopping in Newfoundland, and they went to a bunch of customers and said, "Can we get you a Newfoundland freight? We leave at 2:00 A.M. out of Toronto Airport, and we can give you excellent price because we are going to Madrid." And the customer said, "Are you gonna be there for three years? Like, I'm gonna upset my relationship with Cargojet. Are you gonna be able to give me Regina? Are you gonna be able to give me Saskatoon? Are you gonna be able to give me Moncton? Are you gonna be able to give me Calgary?" You know, we have had those. What they wanna do is they wanna use some domestic element and combine it with their international on the way to that international destination.
I think they are more of a threat to WestJet, which does a bit of a daylight product. They're more of a threat to themselves because they do a lot of, you know, they'll take the business from their bellies and put it on the freighters. But to be honest with you, any customer feedback we have had, you know, they made calls to many customers. I'm not sure if they made a call to you, but, you know, when you look at the kind of network we have built, the kind of service we have, we are very confident that we're gonna have all our customers supporting us through this. I don't. Let's put it this way, I lose a lot of sleep over a lot of things.
That's one thing I definitely not lose a sleep over because they've tried this business twice. They're a great company. They have great resources. They have government money now available to them. To be honest with you, I think the resilience that we have shown and what we have built is second to none, and it's hard to compete. I'm pretty confident that that's not gonna be a factor in our situation. Our model also is ACMI. So 777 that we have committed, four of them are already committed for an ACMI business. You know, we would be very selective in where we fly in terms of trying because we don't wanna go to certain places that they go to. We have our own selective markets that we think we will serve.
Is that, Michael, can you follow up on that?
I was just gonna add just to add to
Thank you for the compliment.
I was just gonna add, not to turn it back into a question to Mike, but earlier this year, we renewed two major domestic contracts, both the TFI International contract and then Loomis Express, both for three-year terms with two, I think with two one-year extensions. So potentially a five-year agreement, replacing or just extending a long-term agreement we've had for + 20 years. I just throw the question back to you, Mike. How seriously, if at all, did your folks consider Air Canada as a competitive threat to Cargojet?
Irra-irrational.
No. You're right. Absolutely. The only reason that any of those customers that would look at an alternative for Cargojet is if we didn't provide the level of service and reliability that we've demonstrated that we could do for the last 15 to 20 years. You know, the two major companies that had their own networks in Canada most recently, which was not that recent ago, but 2014, 2015, was Purolator and Canada Post, who eventually came to a conclusion that they were on a fixed cost network with a high degree of fixed costs and were uncompetitive and were losing market share to their competitors, namely the ones that were on Cargojet's networks, like UPS, who made that decision back in 2003 to go off their fixed network onto Cargojet's network.
Hey, guys. It's Matt Lee from CG, right in the middle. Hi. You know, just on the Purolator and UPS conversation, any update on the timing of those renewals and any potential rate pressure that you're facing on the snap runs?
No. I mean, we have at least two and a half to three years left on both contracts. The contracts allow when we start discussions on it, that would give them sufficient time. We have already had first round of discussions with both of them. There is always, sure, which customer does not want a discount? I mean, everybody looks for a discount. Everybody looks for a better value when they need to improve on things. There is no such pressure that we have to take 20% off our pricing to renew it. Those pressures don't exist. Everybody's looking for a better value proposition today, and whether competition or no competition. We are confident, as Jamie has said in his presentation, till today, I mean, we've renewed every customer contract.
We are very confident that these two contracts will be renewed well before they expire at a certain pricing that makes sense to us going forward, and it's good for them as well. Again, that's another thing I don't lose much sleep on those two as well. We don't take it for granted. We work towards you know ensuring that our service doesn't slip. As Michael said, like, our only competition is that if we perform bad. I think everybody realizes that one thing that has proved in these two years of COVID, that when we did not have a delay and we never had one cancellation because of COVID, and what they have seen in the past three months, what happened with the passenger carriers.
As I said in my presentation, there's 14 carriers that started cargo business here. Every one of them had a connection or were a subsidiary or some product of a passenger airline. I think our customers have learned over the years that, you know, what does real cargo airlines look like.
Kevin from CIBC. Thanks for the presentation. Maybe this is for Scott. If I could just dig into maybe some granularity on the 2026 EBITDA targets. Are you just assuming kind of a base level growth in domestic or whatever the organic growth in your business is, plus the DHL contract? Or are you assuming kind of a full utilization of the 50 aircraft at that point in time in 2026? I guess it seems like ACMI is a growth lever here. Jamie, you mentioned, you know, margins are higher.
Why wouldn't margins, if I just do the quick math in the high 30s% in 2026, why wouldn't that be above 40% if ACMI is kind of the growth lever here, you know, looking at the next three, four years in terms of your targets?
Yeah, that is a good question, and I'll definitely need some help from Jamie on that one. You know, I would just say being a public company and to have EBITDA margins, where's the ceiling on that when you do have competitive pressure? 'Cause you can only take your profitability so far before you are gonna have some competitive pressure. Everything is priced into that model by aircraft type, whether it's a 767 or 777, and it's also priced in whether it is growth in ACMI. Domestic, we've talked about that in the past. That's more like CPI type of growth, but there is some growth in there.
I don't know what more I can tell you on that, but it is by aircraft and it's by product offering type, and it's profitability that we think is achievable.
You know, when we talk about the higher margins of ACMI, Kevin, keep in mind a lot of our infrastructure, what we can produce ACMI margins. It's tough for, let's say, an Atlas to produce in U.S. because we have a domestic network. You know, when we have 17 aircraft dedicated domestic network, all the VPs you saw, we need them. All the flight dispatch simulators. There's a lot of overhead that we have that is domestic, right? It's the network that covers that cost. Our ACMI margins becomes much higher because I don't need two CFOs for one ACMI and one, and I don't need two Jamies, right?
That's why I think we see a better margin than our competitors in the U.S. on our ACMI business because we have a great domestic network and we spread the cost over a bigger fleet. That's one of the reasons our ACMI margins are much better than other companies.
Chris.
Yeah, thanks. Chris Murray from ATB Capital Markets. This morning in your press release, you talked a little bit about Q3 numbers tracking according to plan, what you're seeing. Some of your competitors, of course, have come out and made some pretty dire pronouncements about volumes of what they're seeing. But at the same time we've also seen things like Amazon announcing a second Prime Day. How are you seeing call it the near term as you're dealing with some of these inflation pressures, maybe changes in consumer spending, and how should we be thinking about maybe the next few quarters?
Yeah. No doubt, Chris, there's been, you know, some with inflationary pressures, interest rates, certainly gonna have an impact on overall consumer spending. I think it maybe changes the mix a little bit on e-commerce, on what people are shopping for online versus what they maybe have been shopping for essentials during the COVID-19 pandemic. You talk about some of our competitors. None of our competitors, only one company, announced a change in their earnings projection that was FedEx, a fairly dramatic one. But conversely, we look at, you know, within the two weeks preceding that announcement, both DHL, Deutsche Post had an investor day, I think on September 8, where DHL Express particularly reinforced their guidance for the balance of the year and into 2023. UPS, I think, did something similarly earlier this year.
You're right, Amazon has announced a second Prime week. You know, our expectations for Q3 and for the balance of the year are similar to what we've talked about all year. We're seeing a little bit of softness, I'd say, in the charter market globally. Not necessarily on pricing. Pricing is still well above what it was pre-COVID levels. In terms of our domestic demand, I think for the first six months of the year, we were running about 15%, I believe, year-over-year revenue growth on the domestic business. You know, typically the summer is a little softer than that, but not marginally. We're not seeing any significant drop-off.
We're, you know, three days away from the start of the fourth quarter, which historically has been every single year in the existence of our company, has been our highest revenue quarter. Our volume forecast from our customers, whether it's the domestic business from Amazon, UPS, Canada Post, even DHL themselves here for or FedEx themselves here for the domestic business, certainly the ACMI business that DHL particularly benefits and Amazon. We're already contracted to fly an extra daily charter for Amazon for their domestic use seven days a week from Hamilton to Vancouver, as we did last year, to meet their fourth quarter demand. We're still fairly confident that the year, the quarter and the year are gonna turn out as we predicted.
Nick Corcoran, Cardinal Capital . Just a question. In the presentation, your current pilots are around 370. You're growing that to 500 next year. How should we think about that impacting margins in the near term until you ramp the pilots up?
Every dollar we spend, every person we hire has to be associated with the revenue. These are planes that are coming in, associated with contracts that already are in place. You can look at the same margin. I mean, I can't get three planes deployed unless I have 12 pilots per plane. Those margins and those numbers that we shared long term are baked into our pilot cost, which is baked into it. What happens is when you hire that many pilots, there is obviously a lag for the first three to six months because they're in training and you're paying them. That's been the trend over the past three or four years that will carry on.
I don't see that longer term or even the medium term, we're gonna be impacted for margins because we are hiring 150 more pilots or 100 more pilots, whatever the numbers like will be at the end of the day. All those are growth pilots that are committed with the committed aircraft that are on the way. We don't anticipate that it's gonna have a huge impact. You know, temporarily, as I said, first quarter, we might have a little extra training cost, and we might have some payroll costs in addition to the normal. Again, we've seen that before in the past two years, so it's not something that we're worried about right now.
Hi, Munir Shahin from Montrusco Bolton. We're very pleased with the 2026 outlook. I think it's very achievable with your pedigree. Just maybe a question a bit more on, like, the next one to two years. You kinda alluded in terms of flexibility, maybe on CapEx on planes. Like, what would be your playbook in kind of a scenario of a hard landing? Just kinda give us an idea of what you can do.
All the 76 that we have committed to buying are under contract or they've been spoken for. You know, keep in mind for the past two years, because of the pressure of doing all the charter flights and PPE and vaccine flights and, you know, BC floods, and we did not operate. We delivered a 98% on-time performance, but we were operating without any spare aircraft, even for maintenance purposes. You know, I think this gives us an opportunity to have our fleet with maintenance aircraft, operational spares.
I think that if you're looking for the next couple of years, the flexibility we have is. We have eight 777s , four are spoken for, and four we are looking at, you know, talking to some of the ocean lines. We've talked to a few other customers on ACMI, and a couple of them, we will deploy a domestic and international combination, which could be going from here to Vancouver and then going on to Narita or, and going on to Shanghai and coming back the same way, so we can cover part of the cost of that operation too, with our domestic lift requirements. Do we need to buy all four if there was a hard landing?
I think there is flexibility that, you know, with slight penalties, we can get out of those if we wanted. I think Jamie indicated that at this stage, we have already put one aircraft under CAD 150 million type of CapEx relating to two 767s and one 777 in that CAD 150 million category to say we're gonna put that on hold, and we're gonna take it out of the equation right now. We have flexibility for another couple hundred million dollars if there was a hard landing. We're well prepared with our risk mitigation strategy, that we don't use the conversion slot. We can defer them, or we can pay CAD 1 million penalty and get out of it.
We do have a fairly good flexibility that if you believe everything that FedEx said is happening, not that I believe it, I think there's a mix of their internal issues with the way they have done things. Again, it's their business. I can't comment on. They're a good customer of ours. The whole industry feels that, yes, we are all preparing for a bit of a turbulence, but not certainly a hard landing. You know? That's how we feel. If we do, we do have that we can defer maybe even another a couple of hundred million dollars of expense that we don't need to go through.
I think we have time for two more. We're all available after for questions, but I think Mona.
Hi, Mona Nazir, now CIBC Asset Management. I'm just wondering about supply dynamics. You spoke about the shift 50% belly to 50% cargo, and then that changed during COVID, where we saw 90% go on pure cargo. You spoke about the long-term kind of sweet spot or your vision being between 65% to 70%, 75% going on pure cargo. I'm just wondering about this permanent shift and what's driving it. Obviously customers reducing reliance on belly capacity, but is there a pricing dynamic where we're seeing belly pricing come up and cargo come down? I'm just wondering about the shift in the supply dynamic.
Yeah, I mean, I can add a couple comments, and Ajay can add to it. I think it's really driven by the lack of belly cargo capacity. Certainly pre-COVID, and even today, there's a price differential between buying belly cargo space on a passenger aircraft versus paying the dedicated space on a dedicated cargo aircraft. It's just that the number. During COVID, the number of passenger airlines, particularly with those wide-body transcontinental aircraft that carry 40, 50, 60 tons of cargo in addition, in the belly, in addition to all their passengers and baggage, those older generation Boeing 747-400, A380s, some A330s, almost all of those have been retired. During COVID. As they were parked immediately, and then those airlines.
You only have to look, you don't have to look much further than here in Canada, where Air Canada is a perfect example. They retired 28 or 29 767s, which again, is a wide-body passenger aircraft, has cargo carrying capabilities. They knew they weren't gonna replace them, and, sorry, not their wide-body, their passenger aircraft of choice going forward is the A320, A321XLR, which is a narrow-body aircraft that carries significantly less cargo in the belly than the previous aircraft that were operating those routes. If you just took that example and extrapolated it over the hundreds of airlines around the world that were flying wide-body aircraft that are doing exactly the same thing at a time when demand has gone up arguably 20% or 30%, there's a classic shortage of supply where demand is.
That's why we believe, particularly with the slide that I indicated earlier, with the aircraft that are being retired and what are they being replaced with, there's gonna be a shortage of dedicated cargo capacity to meet that demand for at least the next five to ten years.
Adding to that, I mean, if you look at the DHL experiment, all of a sudden, you know, by using dedicated, ACMI type of aircraft with us, and others, they have almost now noticed improvement in their service level, which makes them more competitive with their competitors. For two years, they've spoiled their customers on dedicated freighters, and they've upped their rates. They've got excellent yields, and now they're competitive with, UPS and FedEx and others. It's very hard for them. We've spoken to DHL about it, and, you know, it's hard for them to go back to that belly model because now they've built up their whole business case on the express product based on the freighters.
I think a lot of customers have been spoiled by seeing the differential in what they can get service-wise with freighters and when the market is willing to pay. I think a combination of what Jamie said and this whole shift in consumer behavior is certainly part of the reason for we feel. It's not just we. We've done a lot of research, and if you look at any publications and stuff like that, it always, it'll show you that the shift is certainly happening. If you're looking at 737 MAX, narrow-body cannot carry any freight, but they're gonna fly to London, right? You'll see A320neos, aircraft that are flying overseas as well now. A lot of narrow-body.
You'll see a lot of these wide bodies internationally being replaced with a lot of narrow body, more frequent flights with less cargo capacity.
I think we have time for one more. We have one here.
Hey, guys. It's [Bear Heiser from Scotia Capital]. This is a fantastic investor day. Thanks for sharing your journey. It's been just a very successful ride for you guys. I guess I just wanted to touch on kinda how you're seeing downside costs any of the businesses in a kinda recessionary environment. In particular for your domestic overnight business, like how much are customers operating above kinda their minimum guarantees, and how have you been pricing that non kinda committed capacity? Like are spot rates like meaningfully above kinda the contract rates that you have? And there's like a mix shift back from the consumer to more business to business. Are you seeing like a higher yield from the excess weight? Just touch on that.
Maybe on the charter business, like how do you kinda see that progressing over the long run? I assume that as spot rates normalize, you'll have, you know, some normalization there, but you have more airplanes, so maybe it's not as. You probably have more downside. So just what that looks like from a revenue drop through perspective.
I mean, the first part of your question, on the domestic side, as I said, we're not seeing, you know, a significant decrease in volumes. You asked the question, what percentage of our customer contract. As you know, you know, we've maintained that probably 75%-80% of our overall domestic volumes are represented by long-term customer contracts that are take rate type agreements that each have an element within them that has a minimum volume guarantee. I would say on 100% of them, they're always above their. Nobody likes to pay for space that they're not using. We purposely don't sell 100% of the capacity to those contract customers for two reasons. One, we know that none of them are very good at predicting or forecasting what their volume.
That's no disrespect to them. It's just the nature of the biz. Nobody knows that Apple's gonna launch a new iPhone 14 this week. If UPS is a carrier of choice, their volume's gonna spike, and they're gonna expect that we're gonna have the flexibility to carry that additional volume on our network, which we do. We also know that they're not always gonna use the capacity that they're paying for, so we sell that. That's what we sell. The rates that we have with our contract customers are pretty much fixed, both for their minimum volume guarantee and their excess. There's no premium for the excess volume.
There's just an expectation that we'll carry it, and then we balance that with another 20% of our business with the 400 or 500 other non-contract customers that we do business on a regular basis with. That is very much spot rate impacted. I would say through COVID because of the and certainly continuing now because of demand, we probably increased, Gord or Vito could tell you in more detail, but we probably collectively increased those rates cumulatively by probably 20% over the last three years. The other parts of our business, you know, the ACMI business is a very, it's a fixed, typically a fixed business, as is a CMI, a fixed rate per block hour with a minimum volume guarantee.
I think it's important, particularly with the DHL relationship, that, you know, people have asked us before, "Well, what if globally DHL doesn't have the same amount of demand that they've seen previously?" As Ajay said, and he can add some comments to it, you know, we're only one of 15 or 16 dedicated cargo carriers that provide or make up part of a global network. We operate 15 dedicated aircraft for them and adding several more over the next couple of years. There's a few fundamental differences between Cargojet and any of the other 14 or 15 dedicated cargo operators. First of all, we have a five-year plus operating agreement for those ACMI aircraft. They don't have that type of an agreement with any other carriers anywhere in the world. They have a financial incentive.
We have a warrants agreement which financially incentivizes them to meet certain revenue milestones to grow their business, so it would be sort of counterproductive for them to take business away from us. Third and most important, and sort of the theme that we've been talking about here today, we are their number one. When you saw Paul's slide on the 99.8 or 99.2% dispatch reliability, we are consistently DHL's number one on-time performance carrier anywhere in the world for them to look at. Even if they had a reduction in demand, I'm confident that they would go to one of their other 14 or 15 not so reliable carriers, that they don't have a five-year operating agreement and no financial incentive and reduce their capacity.
In fact, in a hypothetical world, Cargojet could be a beneficiary of that, where if they went to a South American carrier and canceled, it was poor performing, no operating agreement, and cancel two routes, they may come to us and say, "We're gonna replace those two with one. Cargojet, can you add a new route to that?" We could benefit by that.
No, I think that's why we did a deal with DHL that we did, because we are the only company that has a five-year agreement with numbers, certain number of hours and a certain number of aircraft, and nobody else has that agreement out of the 15 carriers they use. Everybody's on a standard ACMI agreement in the world or 90 days or maybe six-month agreement. You know, by the design of the whole contract is meant to be that if there is a slowdown, we're the last one to go because we are, number one, performing, and number two, we have a strategic agreement with DHL, and DHL does not have any other strategic agreement with any other carrier. They've never done a five-year deal with anybody.
I think the trust level and the factor is very, very high between the two organizations.
I'll just add quickly on the charter part of the question. We have seen some softness in overall demand on global ad hoc charters. It's a very unpredictable business because it's certainly ad hoc. It depends on what the supply and demand is. It depends on, you know, if there's a flood or a hurricane in Puerto Rico, where likely we've done charters to Puerto Rico and relief missions. But in terms of, you know, the demand is still strong. Pricing is still very strong. If I gave you, and I've given some of you an example before of, you know, pre-COVID pricing, an average 767 aircraft charter out of Asia or out of Shanghai to North America was probably in the $250,000 per flight rate.
During the height of COVID, it was more than double of that. It's dropped back, but it's nowhere near the 250 mark that it was before. It's probably in the, you can ask Vito afterwards, it's probably in the 350-400 range. As we said, the larger, and we've experienced this over the last 20 years of our growth, our ad hoc charter business kind of grows in direct proportion to the size of the fleet of aircraft that we have and where those aircraft are geographically located around the world.
Gives us much more opportunity, as I said earlier, if we get a charter out of Europe and we have an aircraft based there on a weekend that was doing a DHL flight during the week than we do if we had to ferry the aircraft from North America over there. I think we have one more about.
I think just to close this charter thing, I mean, there's not a dull moment where the charter is needed. I mean, if you look at it, Amazon put on a Prime Day, second Prime Day. Now nobody expected that, and there's gonna be a bunch of charters coming out of that. Or you know, Puerto Rico disaster, so there are charters coming out of that. It's one of those things that some event in the world that triggers that. Obviously, we don't have any vaccines or PPE charters, not today. Certainly, there's events like BC Flood had 50 charters for us during that time.
There's obviously we can't predict what's gonna happen, but the life cycle tells us in the past 10 years that there's always every couple of months there is something that triggers a whole bunch of charters, so.
We'll have one last one, and then I'm-
Okay.
We got to get going. We got it. Sorry.
Thank you. It's Tim James with TD Securities. You've touched on this question a little bit, but I wanna more directly focus on your mix of e-commerce related volume and other volume. How do you, when you think out over, let's say, out through 2026, how does the mix shift? I'm thinking e-commerce obviously growing more quickly. How does the mix shift impact your business? Do you need to do anything differently? Does the network evolve? Do the economics change? I'm just wondering if you can talk a little bit about how greater e-commerce mix influences the business.
I mean, it's not something that we look at, you know, other than we realize that e-commerce, as I mentioned before, and it's not us telling you that, it's Amazon telling us that Canada is their fastest growing country in the world, primarily because of the low penetration rate of online sales as a percentage of overall retail sales in Canada lagging behind the U.S. and both all of North America lagging well behind, Europe and Asia, particularly. We see. You know, if I look at Purolator, and then Purolator just opened a new Ontario sort facility that they invested, and they just opened it in August in North York. They made an announcement back in to give you some perspective on it, Tim.
Back in, I think it was just before COVID, so probably the fall of 2019, part of a billion-dollar investment in infrastructure, which included their Ontario sort facility. They indicated that at that time, they expected that within five years, more than 50% of their business would be represented by e-commerce, and that or that's why they were investing in the infrastructure and the facilities and the automation. They would tell you today, COVID brought that forward, and today well above 50% of their volume is represented by e-commerce. To us, it's really somewhat irrelevant. We don't differentiate, or our customers don't differentiate. Using the Purolator example, when we go and pick up five containers from their facility going to Vancouver, we don't know whether it's B2B business, whether it's B2C business, whether it's pharmaceuticals, whether it's. We don't know.
There's no differentiation between the rates. There's no differentiation between the product. We just know from customers like Purolator, Canada Post, Amazon, that are in the e-commerce space that are indicating that you're gonna see significant double-digit growth in that sector of the business. The fact that that sector is becoming, and the Purolator, I use them just as an example, a bigger proportion of the type of product that customers like that ship with us, we're gonna benefit by that. Then, you know, secondarily, globally, e-commerce is not just a Canadian phenomenon, and DHL and others that we're servicing internationally are feeling the impact and the growth of e-commerce and the effect that's having in a positive way on the volumes that they ship, which again translates into more aircraft that they potentially are gonna ask us to fly for them.
I think that's. I think so. Just to close off on the domestic stuff, I know some of you guys asked about the Air Canada issue. You know, with the new 757s, our domestic strategy is a lot different in going in November. Out of Hamilton and out of Montreal, those are the two outbound stations where we have a lot of cargo and goes this way. Between the cities, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Moncton, Halifax, St. John's, these are the major cities, Montreal, we service. We are the only carrier domestically with the 757 strategy that we've got the additional 757s oncoming. We would have direct flights. You know, we would be bypassing the Winnipeg hub and a lot of things. We'd be bypassing the Moncton hub.
We would also be having direct flight into Vancouver, direct into Edmonton, direct into Calgary. It saves, obviously, time. It gives our customers more flexibility that they can take a little more time, extend their pickup time by half an hour to their customer, bring it to us a little bit later. With the direct flight, it saves a lot of time. It saves a lot of de-icing costs for us. It saves double handling into Winnipeg and certain hubs or Calgary we go to. I think the network improvement and the enhancement we are putting in together with everybody situated in the city, and I know some of you guys have said it, like, why haven't we been issued it?
We took up three years, guys, for this renewal, and so there are timelines in it when we talk and when we discuss. I can assure you that the kind of barriers to entry, let's call it that we have and the value offering, the service offering that we have, you know, they'll be hard pressed not to sort of work with us on it. We're not, you know, arrogant about it. We treat all of our customers with respect that they should be treated with. I feel that we have a very good network and the performance and all the enhancements that we are making with the 757, it would be a very network to receive by anybody. Thank you, everybody.
We sincerely appreciate you guys taking the time. I think we're gonna take a quick lunch, and then you know, there's tours planned. Some of you can go fly to London today with the simulator. Literally, you can ask the operator to set it up that you're taking off from Heathrow and landing in Paris, if you'd like to do that as a short trip. We have an aircraft outside for a tour of what a 767-300 cargo plane looks like. Some of you, if you wanna visualize that cargo plane, that can take up to eight, seven to eight 53-foot trailers that you see on the highway.
That it's literally eight trucks flying together, and the 777 would be double of that. I think, and we have the operational excellence team and the department as well. Please enjoy the tours. Thank you again for attending our first Investor Day.