I'll try and work thru this, but it is with limited knowledge and some assumptions.
Atlas Profits
Atlas Air Worldwide Holdings is flying more profitably thanks to its scheduled freighter service but the carrier says it plans to put more of its aircraft into its core ACMI business. emphasis added
The parent of Atlas Air and Polar Air Cargo showed a $32.4 million net profit in the third quarter, a four-fold improvement over last year, and revenue grew nearly 10 percent to $395.9 million.
First, both Atlas and Polar have scheduled service now. Atlas's has a good profit with theirs because the US government usually pays to get the plane to HKG or ICN, so very few loads of unpaid sailboat fuel to Asia. Polars profits are there because it has been trimmed to just a few better margin cities, but the loads back to Asia are limited. This is where the DHL deal is huge. They will be a fixed amount of pallet space paid for by DHL, used or not. Kinda like ACMI, paid for no matter what.
Most of that improvement came in Polars forwarder-focused scheduled business, as well as a big jump in commercial charters. more added emphasis
It does not say, "The big improvement was in Polars scheduled service". Read it again. "Most of that improvement" was Polar
AND big jump in commercial charters.
Revenue from ACMI operations was down nearly 12 percent in the first nine months of the year and makes up only about 22 percent of AAWH's overall revenue.
Only one -200 doing ACMI now. Used to be more.
But Atlas says six 747-400s coming to the carrier through DHL's $150 million investment in Polar will take a role in the ACMI business. WTF, over? Six coming?
"(The 747s) will migrate from the scheduled service platform they are operating in today to a platform that will generate a profit contribution more consistent with our traditional ACMI operations, while mitigating traditional scheduled-service risks such as fuel," said Atlas President and CEO William J. Flynn.
When the Polar planes start flying for DHL, they won't be considered schedule service anymore? The six are the Polar -400's and maybe they will be considered ACMI (ref. the first quoted sentence) once DHL pulls the strings, using Polars landing rights? Atlas got China Airlines into a lot of US cities, because Atlas was a flag carrier, that CAL's could not have gotten into as easily on their own.
This has been said before. The ACMI -400's are the big money makers. The pure scheduled service -400's, don't clear the profit the ACMI planes do, so by guaranteeing loads with DHL, the scheduled service planes (now ACMI) will be making closer to the ACMI ones and have less risk than scheduled-service with fuel prices, as an example.