Tag: Courier/Express/Parcels

Doors open on 100 new jobs and GBP 7m TNT investment in the UK

Posted by | May 9, 2007 | |

TNT UK has invested GBP 7 million and created more than 100 new jobs in the Leyland and Preston area as part of its drive to consolidate its market-leading position.

The 10-acre site at Aston Way, Moss Side Park, is the latest addition to TNT’s nationwide network of more than 60 depots. Handling tens of thousands of business parcels and packages every week, the depot provides a critical strategic link for businesses throughout the North-West and up into Scotland.

Employing a total of 145 staff, the depot is the largest TNT depot in the UK and with 67-loading bays.

The depot, which became fully operational last autumn, is at the leading edge of innovation for TNT. New high-tech scanning devises for warehouse staff, ‘in-cab’ mobile worker units for drivers and the latest sortation machine technology were all trialled at Preston before being rolled out to other TNT depots around the UK.

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Homebase sales take shine off Home Retail

Posted by | May 9, 2007 | |

Home Retail Group has posted a jump in profits for last year, despite weaker sales at its Homebase chain.
The group, which also owns Argos, said this morning that it had beaten analyst expectations with a pre-tax profit before exceptional items of GBP 376m in the year to March 2006. This was a 12% jump on the previous year.
Total group sales were up 6% to GBP 5.85bn. Chief executive Terry Duddy said this meant the company had now captured 10% of the total UK home merchandise market.
Argos achieved a 2.4% rise in like-for-like sales, which Mr Duddy said was partly due to last year’s World Cup – which sparked a surge in sales of new televisions.
But Homebase’s like-for-like sales dropped by 1.4%, due to disappointing sales of DIY and home decorating products. This follows a 3.1% drop in comparable sales the previous year.
Shares in the company opened down 1.75p at GBP 4.54, but analysts were encouraged by today’s results.
“Argos is generating like-for-like sales growth, whilst Homebase appears to have arrested the decline in like-for-like sales and the group continues to expand its store numbers for each,” said Keith Bowman, equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.
“Distribution remains a key strength at Argos, with internet orders up by 45% and now representing over 16% of total sales. It could perhaps be argued that Argos is slowly becoming the Amazon of the UK.”
Home Retail Group declined to give any details of current trading this morning, but cautioned that this year would be challenging given recent interest rate rises.
“In addition, comparatives for the retail market as a whole, and particularly Argos, become tougher as we start to face last year’s positive impacts of the World Cup,” the group warned.

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DPD aiming to expand in Germany

Posted by | May 8, 2007 | |

German parcel delivery specialist DPD, a subsidiary of French postal service operator La Poste, is hoping to increase its share of the German market thanks to a new strategy. The company’s core business will in future include deliveries to private addresses, express deliveries within a guaranteed time and worldwide deliveries. Until now, the company has focused on national and European parcel deliveries.

Experts estimate that the overall market grew by an average of 4.4 per cent last year, while the market for deliveries to private customers grew by over 10 per cent. This trend is expected to continue over the next few years. DPD currently delivers around 35 million parcels to private customers each year and is thus well behind DHL, the express subsidiary of German postal service operator Deutsche Post, and Hermes, a subsidiary of German mail-order group Otto. Among other measures, DPD plans to expand its network of shops; the company intends to have 2,500 shops by the end of the year and 5,000 by 2010, compared with only around 500 at present. Last year, DPD increased its turnover by 7 per cent to around 1bn euros.

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Azkar continues to expand in Spain

Posted by | May 8, 2007 | |

The Spanish express and freight company Azkar has continued its expansion in Spain by opening three new distribution centres in Toledo and Jaén provinces.

The two Toledo centres, located on plots of 8,000 sqm (3,348 sqm constructed) and 2,028 sqm (1,962 sqm constructed) will be staffed by 55 people with 25 vehicles, and are located on the Mariola industrial estate in Huecas and at Talavera de la Reina, respectively.

Azkar has also built a 1,052 sqm facility on the Los Olivares industrial estate in the Andalusian city of Jaén, where 28 employees will work with six pick-up and delivery vehicles.

The logistics operator has been expanding rapidly over the past five years, investing EUR 175 million modernising and automating infrastructure and fleet. It has invested nearly EUR 40 million since the beginning of 2006, including opening new platforms near Bilbao and Zaragoza to improve distribution across the Iberian peninsula and connections with the rest of Europe. It also bought Barcelona-based freight forwarder Boss Continental earlier this year.

Azkar now has around 90 installations in Spain and Portugal on over 1.1 million sqm of land (over 640,000 sqm of warehouses and offices), employs 5,000 workers and has a fleet of more than 2,200 vehicles. It is a member of the EuroExpress urgent package delivery network and has an office in Shanghai.

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DHL Innovation project wins RFID Journal Award 2007

Posted by | May 8, 2007 | |

The pilot project “temperature-monitored pharmaceutical logistics with RFID” conducted by the DHL Innovation Initiative was honored with the “RFID Journal Award 2007” at the congress “RFID Journal LIVE: Putting RFID to Work” (held from April 30 through May 2, 2007, in Orlando, Florida). The RFID application developed by DHL in cooperation with the innovation partners IBM and Infratab was nominated in the category “Best Use of RFID in a Service.”

Today’s pharmaceutical products generally consist of temperature-sensitive ingredients that can lose their effectiveness when they are placed in an environment that is too cold or too hot. The DHL Innovation Initiative developed an inventive solution to monitor temperature-sensitive pharmaceutical products during transport. RFID sensor tags made by the development partner Infratab monitor the temperature of pharmaceutical shipments. The stored measurement data can be read by a RFID reader without physical contact using radio waves. In the process, the shipment does not have to be opened. The link to the database is handled by solutions created by IBM, one of the global innovation partners of the DHL Innovation Initiative. Thanks to the new service, pharmaceutical companies can react to temperatures that exceed or fall below limits even while the shipment is still being transported.

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