SAS Cargo has appointed Allied Aviation as its General Sales and Services Agent (GSSA) for India, effective 1 October, as the Scandinavian carrier builds freight capacity on a five-times-weekly route between Mumbai and Copenhagen.

SAS Cargo will operate the Copenhagen-Mumbai services with Airbus A330 aircraft. Allied Aviation takes responsibility for cargo sales, supervision and revenue optimisation across India under the mandate.

"This is an important addition to our airline portfolio, giving Indian exporters direct capacity into Copenhagen and access to SAS Cargo's wider network across Scandinavia and beyond," said Kritika Seth, executive director at Allied Aviation.

The appointment signals SAS Cargo's intent to establish a foothold in one of Asia's fastest-growing air freight origin markets without committing its own commercial resources on the ground. Outsourcing sales to a local GSSA gives the carrier immediate access to established forwarder relationships across nine Indian cities — a cheaper and faster route to market than building a proprietary sales organisation.

Allied Aviation will chase a broad commodity mix on the Mumbai services: high-value pharmaceuticals, perishables, engineering goods and machinery, garments, and e-commerce shipments. Pharma and perishables are natural fits for the route — India's pharmaceutical exporters have long sought direct European connections, and temperature-sensitive cargo requires the bellyhold capacity that widebody A330 operations provide.

The GSSA will sell through a network of offices in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Delhi, Chennai, Bengaluru, Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram. That footprint spans India's main manufacturing and export hubs, from pharma production centres in Hyderabad to garment clusters around Chennai and Bengaluru.

"Our teams have longstanding connections with forwarders across India and will use that experience to build demand for the new Mumbai services and support SAS Cargo as it develops its presence in the Indian cargo market," said Seth.

For Allied Aviation, the SAS mandate adds a European carrier to a portfolio the company is clearly working to expand. For SAS Cargo, the arrangement puts local commercial expertise behind five weekly widebody rotations at a point when the carrier is still developing its position in the Indian market.

The commercial test now sits with Allied Aviation: converting forwarder relationships into sustained bellyhold load factors on five weekly A330 flights, and demonstrating that Indian export demand — pharmaceuticals, garments, machinery and e-commerce — can fill capacity into Copenhagen year-round.