Swissport International has signed binding agreements to form a Swissport Indonesia joint venture with Jakarta-based UNEX Aviation Services, buying into a market that handled 101 million passengers in 2024 and that IATA expects to be the world’s fourth-largest for aviation by 2030. The move gives the Zurich-headquartered handler a foothold in Southeast Asia’s largest economy without the cost or time of building a licence and client base from scratch.
Swissport will acquire a stake in UNEX, which already holds nationwide ground handling licenses in Indonesia and runs air cargo warehousing for domestic and international airlines at Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, and neither company has given a start date for expanded services or named the additional airports where the partnership will operate next.
The two partners plan to move beyond cargo and warehousing into ramp handling and passenger services, then extend the joint venture to other Indonesian airports. For an airport operator weighing handler competition, that signals a third international player entering a market historically dominated by state-linked and local ground handling firms.
Warwick Brady, president and CEO of Swissport, said the partnership supports the company’s strategy of expanding its cargo business while building a stronger ground handling presence in Southeast Asia. Budiman Tedja, founder and CEO of UNEX Aviation Services, said the deal will let his company broaden its service range and strengthen operational capability, though he gave no figure for the investment involved.
Indonesia’s scale is the draw. The country spans more than 17,000 islands and recorded roughly 101 million domestic and international passengers and 1 million metric tons of airfreight in 2024, according to figures Swissport cited from IATA. That forecast of fourth place globally by 2030 puts Indonesia in the same growth bracket that ACI World has flagged as a $4trn capacity planning problem for governments worldwide, and it explains why a handler already present in China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand wants a sixth Asia-Pacific market on the books.
Scale matters here because Swissport says its regional Asia-Pacific operations handled around 25 million passengers, 632,000 flights and 450,000 metric tons of cargo in 2025 with 10,000 staff, a base the Indonesia deal adds to rather than replaces. The cargo side is the more interesting bet for airport commercial teams: freighter and belly-cargo growth in emerging Asia-Pacific markets has already drawn attention from carriers elsewhere, as seen in LATAM Cargo’s planned US freighter debut, and it tracks the broader passenger volume growth ACI World reported hitting a record 9.8 billion globally in 2025.
Who this helps, who it does not
Airlines flying into Soekarno-Hatta gain a second internationally networked handler option alongside incumbents, which should put some competitive pressure on turnaround pricing and service levels over time. Airport operators elsewhere in Indonesia with ambitions to attract international carriers get a template: a licensed local cargo handler paired with a global brand is a faster route to credibility than waiting for a multinational to enter alone. It does less for airports outside Indonesia immediately, beyond confirming that Southeast Asia is where ground handling capital is currently moving.
What to do about it
Airports and airlines operating in Indonesia should ask Swissport and UNEX for a timeline on which airports get ramp and passenger handling beyond Jakarta, since that list will determine whether this is a cargo-only deal with a growth story attached or a genuine multi-airport entry. Commercial directors elsewhere should treat Indonesia’s 2030 forecast as a planning input rather than a surprise; the capacity case was already being made at industry level before this deal.
Reported by AviationPros.
