DHL has completed its $110 million Central Asia Hub (CAH) expansion - first large-scale automated Express hub in Asia Pacific, the company said in a statement early in the week. With a total investment of $210 million, the facility significantly boosts DHL's operational capability in Asia, it added. Situated at the Hong Kong International Airport, the Central Asia Hub has doubled in size to 35,000 sqm - about the size of 120 tennis courts - and is expected to handle 40 million shipments this year. With the expansion, the highly sophisticated and automated facility has a throughput of 75,000 pieces per hour (pph) of flyers and conveyable shipments, an increase of 114 percent compared to the 35,000 pph throughput capacity before the expansion. With the automation, the throughput cycle time has been further reduced from 12 minutes to just 7 minutes. The increased throughput of the automated CAH is made possible because of an advanced Autosort system which can handle 35,000 conveyable shipments and 40,000 flyers per hour. Key automated features of the facility include a bank of singulators which arrange parcels into a single queue, six-sided camera scanners which scan all sides of conveyable shipments, and a shoe sorter matrix which directs the shipments to the relevant chutes according to their destination. “Strategically located within a four-hour flight time to major cities in Asia Pacific, the CAH is complemented by a well-established Asia Air Network which is served by more than 20 aircraft and over 500 commercial daily flights. The expansion of the CAH brings with it heightened speed, efficiency, accuracy and significantly bolsters DHL's operational capacity in Asia Pacific,” said Jerry Hsu, President, Greater China Area, DHL Express. “Asia Pacific continues to be a key growth driver - in the first half of 2008, we grew 13 percent year-on-year. The expansion of the CAH is a testament to the continued growth of intra-Asia trade and the Asia-Europe trade lane. Currently, over 60 percent of express cargo processed by the Central Asia Hub is intra-Asia Pacific shipments, a figure we expect to continue to grow alongside rising intra-regional trade,” said Dan McHugh, CEO, DHL Express Asia Pacific. In keeping with this service enhancement, from this month, DHL will increase the number of postal codes for its DHL Express 12:00 service across Asia Pacific by 25 percent.
