Amerijet International (M6, Miami International) has confirmed it is shutting down its freight forwarding business, iTN Worldwide, in April 2023 to concentrate on its core airline business.

"After carefully reviewing Amerijet’s portfolio, we decided to close iTN by the end of April 2023. We made this difficult decision to focus on growing our core business," a spokesperson informed ch-aviation.

"Over the past two years, we have been focused on our core growth strategy to expand our scheduled and charter airline operations. We have tripled the number of aircraft we operate, with additional converted B767-300F aircraft on order arriving over the next 24 months," she said.

iTN Worldwide is an international freight forwarder and logistics service provider. Services include air freight, ocean freight, ground freight, customs brokerage, contract logistics, and e-commerce.

Chief Executive Officer Tim Strauss reportedly informed iTN Worldwide employees on February 22 that the company would cease operations at the end of April following "a lengthy, careful and thorough review" of its portfolio of businesses.

"As iTN represents a nominal percentage of Amerijet's overall financial results," Amerijet Chief Commercial Officer Eric Wilson informed FreightWaves. "Freight forwarding has not been a core business. The freight forwarding industry is very fragmented, and to be successful in forwarding requires scalability."

Wilson said exiting the forwarding business would marginally benefit Amerijet's bottom line. Still, the main reason for the change was to streamline management's responsibilities to spend more time expanding the airline's markets and managing its local delivery and national road feeder service.

He said that selling iTN Worldwide was not an option because the company was so small that the transaction expenses outweighed the expected value. iTN Worldwide's 29 employees would be offered opportunities to join Amerijet.

Strauss has implemented a rapid growth strategy at Amerijet since taking the helm a couple of years ago by growing the fleet, opening new markets, and modernising its IT system.

According to the ch-aviation fleets module, Amerijet's fleet has grown to 23 aircraft, including:

Amerijet also began using a cloud-based cargo management and reservation system and new crew scheduling and revenue management systems while moving its maintenance system to a cloud computing environment.