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Investment will be focused on allowing DPD to expand its next-day parcel capacity, including £100m on vehicles and £60m on 15 new regional hubs – 10 more than was originally planned in 2020. The rest of the investment will be spent on technology.
DPD will also create 2,500 new full-time jobs, including depot, hub and management positions, and hire 3,500 additional new drivers.
The investment and recruitment will be completed by this year’s Black Friday in November, ahead of what DPD predicts will be the busiest Cyber Weekend and Christmas period in its history.
Dwain McDonald, DPD chief executive, said: “We are experiencing the biggest boom in online retailing in the UK’s history and we are making this unprecedented investment in our infrastructure and people to ensure we can continue to meet the high levels of demand for our services.
”I do think the high street will bounce back from where things are now, but we have to base our modelling on our conversations with retailers and their projections. It looks like there will remain a much greater reliance on ecommerce in the future – that’s going to be our ‘new normal’. This investment and expansion mean that we will continue to be right there for our retail customers, alongside them, with the capacity to cope with the demand they are seeing online.
“Since this began, we have been handling parcel volumes more akin to the festive seasonal peak than this time of year. For example, volumes over Easter were double last year.”
