Deutsche Post DHL is building a new parcel centre at Ludwigsfelde in Brandenburg, just outside Berlin.

The new ‘mega’ parcel centre is to be built on a 165,000 square metre site. It will have the capacity to handle around 50,000 shipments an hour, and is to complement DHL’s two existing parcel centres at nearby Rüdersdorf and Börnicke.

“The parcel market is still growing rapidly due to the e-commerce boom, in particular,” said Jürgen Gerdes, Board Member for the Post – eCommerce – Parcel division at Deutsche Post DHL Group.

“We are making our network even tighter, and continuously investing in the efficiency of our parcel infrastructure in order to carry on offering our customers the same high service quality in terms of speed and reliability in the future. Another reason we have become the best parcel provider in the market is because we have the best network. The new parcel center that we are now setting up is in a region with particularly strong parcel growth, indeed it represents an essential component of our strategy.”

Across its 34 parcel centres, Deutsche Post DHL has a sorting capacity in the region of a million parcels per hour. The logistics giant expects an average annual parcel growth in the region of 6% a year until 2020.

In 2016, Deutsche Post DHL Group commissioned its largest parcel centre to date, in Obertshausen, which also has a sorting capacity of 50,000 shipments an hour. In the summer of 2017, construction work began on the similarly high-performance parcel centre in Bochum, which is scheduled to begin operations in 2019.