OREANDA-NEWS. February 24, 2012. The DPD Eesti courier company opened a new logistics center in the Juri technology park to the south of the Estonian capital Tallinn for an investment of approximately two million euros.

The existing DPD Eesti terminal in Tallinn has a sorting capacity of 2,000 to 2,400 parcels per hour, compared with the new terminal's hourly capacity of up to 4,500 parcels. The gross area of DPD's new terminal is 2,039 square meters, about as much as of the old terminal, with an additional 822.2 square meters of office space.

The new sorting line requires a smaller number of personnel. The workers to become redundant as a result will be employed in other duties, managers of DPD Eesti told reporters.

The property of the new terminal belongs to United Investors, from which DPD rents the building for a period of up to 15 years.

DPD Eesti, a company of the international Geopost group, handled approximately 2.2 million parcels during 2011, 19 percent more than in 2010. By the year 2014 that figure is estimated to rise to 2.5 million and by the year 2020 to 3.6 million.

The manager of DPD Eesti, Tarmo Tael, said DPD has a market share of roughly 30 percent in Estonia at this point and it is seen to stay at that level in the future. Growth in the volume of parcels rather depends on economic growth than livening of international online trade, he added.

Tael said that according to forecasts, in parcels sent by businesses to customers volumes are set to grow many times faster than in consignments between businesses.

Parcels sent by businesses to private individuals currently make up of 12 percent of parcels handled by DPD Eesti, compared with 20 percent in parcels handled by companies of the DPD group in Europe and 40 percent in the UK.

DPD Eesti gives work to approximately 200 people and has 4,000 contractual clients.