Australia Post invests $400m to boost eCommerce boom

Australia Post will spend an additional $400 million to boost its parcel operations after seeing a 32 per cent increase in eCommerce over the past two years.

This brings the company’s total committed investment to more than $1 billion in over three years.

This investment will see the creation of five brand new facilities in Perth, Melbourne’s Bayswater, Western Sydney, Botany and Tullamarine.

Related: Australia Post meets online shopping growth with $82M parcel facility

The business has also committed an additional $20 million in upgrading systems to cloud based solutions over the next year to improve parcel scanning and tracking in the network.

Australia Post Group Chief Executive Officer & Managing Director, Paul Graham, said it was essential the business continued to invest in major parcel processing hubs to keep up with the boom in online shopping experienced during the pandemic.

“Australia Post has an unrivalled delivery and post office network. We know our customers want their parcel delivered as quickly and efficiently as possible so that’s why we are further increasing capacity with five brand new processing facilities before our peak period in 2022” Graham said.

“Four of these new facilities are located close to major eCommerce hubs in NSW and Victoria, with the fifth a $42 million investment on the west coast to meet the growing demand for parcel services in Western Australia,” he said.

He continued that this is in addition to newly launched facilities in Adelaide and pop-up facilities across the network, adding 30 per cent extra processing capacity this Christmas.

“We are also investing to extend our already extensive last mile delivery network – with a further $31 million committed to the new electric delivery vehicle fleet – which are better for the environment and safer for our people,” he added.

Australia Post delivers more than 10 million parcels a week across the country.

Over 5.7 million Australian households are now consistently shopping online, and Australia Post said it is expected eCommerce will continue to grow over the coming years by 9-10 per cent per annum on average over the next decade.

Source: Australia Post newsroom