DHL Express celebrated the tenth anniversary of its Leipzig airfreight hub on the weekend of 1-2 September, with a family celebration for employees and an exclusive festival concert for invited citizens from all over central Germany.
The final event on Sunday was an official ceremony in the Leipzig Gewandhaus, attended by Saxony's Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer and his Saxony-Anhalt counterpart, Dr Ing. Reiner Haseloff.
Describing the location as “a unique success story”, the express carrier pointed out that the operation has grown from a 48,000sq m sorting centre opened in 2008 into the world's "largest and most modern DHL express hub", covering 1.2m sq m with 5,700 employees, and represents a total investment of €655m. The operation, at Leipzig-Halle Airport, is one of DHL Express’ three global hubs.
DHL Express Europe chief executive John Pearson, said: "For ten years now, the hub has been a symbol of our growth, network effectiveness and excellence that customers expect from DHL Express.” It was also “a job engine” for the region around Leipzig, he added.
The hub handles 350,000 consignments every night flown by an average of 65 planes per working day to more than 50 destinations worldwide. DHL’s Leipzig-based aircraft fleet is including Airbus A300-600 conversions and five Airbus A330-200s are maintained by the company's own mechanics at on-site hangar.
Future plans included a €25m simulator training centre due to open by 2020 to allow fleet-specific and configuration-specific training for crew at DHL’s European Air Transport (EAT) airline subsidiary.
EAT Leipzig chief executive Markus Otto pointed out that natural gas-fired combined heat and power generation covers a large part of the site’s energy requirements and 1,000sq m of solar cells have been installed on the hangar roof to generate electricity, saving over 3,000 tonnes of CO² emissions.
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