Maersk plans to construct a 43,000m2 Maersk Flow Warehouse in Duisburg, Germany.
The services Maersk the warehouse will offer include cross-dock, pallet storage and all value-added services along the supply chain – from customs clearance to consolidation and deconsolidation. As a general contractor, German developer Goldbeck International is expected to complete the Flow Warehouse in Duisburg-Walsum for Maersk in 2023. The warehouse’s 84 dock levelers will handle up to 32,000 40ft containers of customer cargo each year. The property, which has a total area of 110,000m2, is part of the port of Duisburg (Duisport) and has a direct water connection to the Rhine. It offers an expansion reserve in addition to the already-planned 50,000m2 of open space.
Thanks to the planned modular construction, a significant portion of the CO2 emissions that would otherwise be generated during the construction of a warehouse of this size should be avoided. By featuring special building insulation, heat pumps and a roof-mounted photovoltaic system, the warehouse is expected to earn a BREEAM Excellent rating. In addition, greenery will be planted on some parts of the roofs, facades and a noise barrier, and nesting boxes for bats and birds will be installed on the exterior walls.
Now that the building permit has been issued, the construction of the new Flow Warehouse will begin in Duisburg. The company expects all modes of transportation to come together here – inland barges on the central Rhine waterway (connecting to the ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam), railway lines (to the ports of Northern Germany) and trucks via the main road axes of Western Europe’s economies. In addition, the air freight hubs of Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Cologne/Bonn and Düsseldorf can be reached from Duisburg, which is also a European logistics hub connecting Mediterranean and Adriatic gateways.
The warehouse forms part of the company’s expansion to improve its end-to-end logistics solutions to customers worldwide. In 2022, Maersk opened five new warehouses globally, equal to 178,000m2, adding to a total active capacity of 226 warehouses and 3,400,000m2 across the world. Several additional Maersk warehouses are planned to go into operation in Europe in the coming months.
Jens-Ole Krenzien, North Europe continent managing director, Maersk, said, “We are thrilled that we will soon be able to offer our diverse logistics solutions to our customers at this key crossroads between Western European markets. The Maersk Flow Warehouse offers direct water access and trimodal connections. For our customers it will be a value-adding decoupling point optimizing transport modes and creating flexibility in their product flows. We will be able to increase the speed to market significantly for our customers by enabling them to by-pass their European gateway or stock-keeping warehouses.
“Rising demand among many of our customers for resilient end-to-end logistics solutions from a single provider shows us that these additional capacities are urgently needed. For this reason, we are currently massively and rapidly expanding our global warehousing and distribution portfolio in many countries in Europe, but also in the rest of the world – always in close dialog with our customers to meet their exact needs.
“By 2040, we aim to make our logistics services completely climate-neutral along the entire supply chain – meaning at sea, on land and in the air. However, for us, sustainability goes much further than the central issue of climate protection. With our warehouses, in addition to very low CO2 emissions and optimal flows of goods, it is always important to us to create a building that people enjoy working in and that simultaneously also contributes to biodiversity – as will soon be the case in Duisburg.”