Competitor Watch

Irish postal operator AnPost has opened a new 50,000 sqm Dublin Parcel Hub (DPH) following a €15m investment in automated parcel processing.

The new facility is a gateway for incoming and outgoing national and international parcels and is capable of processing up to 13,000 parcels an hour. DPH changes the company’s parcel operation from manual to a 90% automated process. The company said it represented a ‘key milestone in AnPost’s transformation from an old world of letters to a new world of ecommerce logistics.’

At Royal Mail, we’re on a journey to automate more than 80% of parcels by 2023/24.

The company announced that its new hub handled over one million parcels generated by online shoppers during Black Friday weekend.

‘With parcel volumes growing at 40% per annum, AnPost needed to make a step change into parcel automation,’ the company said. ‘We believe that Ireland can become a world leader in e-Commerce and the DPH is an important milestone in this development.’

This year, AnPost will process 16m parcels from the UK, 5m from the US, Canada and Brazil, and over 1m from Germany.

Meanwhile, DPD Ireland has spent €2m on expanding its sorting capacity by 20% at its central sortation hub in Athlone, following a period of sustained growth. The company claims it is on track to deliver 22m parcels this year, compared to 19m last year. Over the peak Christmas period, DPD Ireland said it will process around 170,000 parcels per day throughout its network of 34 depots. A total of 21,000 parcels will be sorted every hour, compared to non-peak parcel volumes of 14,000 an hour.

In July, we announced the start of work on a fully-automated parcel hub in Warrington, the first of three hubs we’ll be building in the UK by 2024. The hubs are part of our major, five-year UK ‘turnaround and grow’ plan, and provide an extension to our UK delivery network that will introduce a second daily delivery for next day parcels and larger items. The second delivery is expected to be fully operational by 2023.