Metro Group plans largest retail logistics park in Germany | Progresiv
Metro Group plans to build its largest logistics hub in Marl to service the German wholesale stores of Metro Cash & Carry and the Real hypermarkets. With a total area of more than 220,000 square meters and over 1,000 jobs, it will be at the same time the largest retail logistics park in the whole of Germany. The new hub represents a central element of Metro Group's new logistics strategy announced in September 2015. 
"The location in Marl is a stroke of luck for our logistics strategy in Germany", says Mark Frese, Chief Financial Officer of Metro Group and also responsible for the company's logistics. "With this new hub, we complete the new logistics network of Metro Group in Germany and will be able to even better meet the needs of our sales lines Metro Cash & Carry and Real in the future."
As part of the reorganisation and replacing the former seven logistics hubs, the logistics services shall in the future be provided by two new, more modern and larger logistics centres as well as by one extended location, and handle a significantly larger volume of goods.
Metro Group had intensively examined potential properties in recent months. The main criteria included property size, development costs, soil conditions, ownership structure and transport infrastructure. Following the presentation of a new location in Kirchheim an der Weinstraße in March this year, the new Metro Group logistics park in Marl will combine the new, central German warehouses of Real and Metro Cash & Carry at one location. Together with the warehouse in Hamm, which is to be extended, the two new locations form the basis of the new, modernised logistics network of Metro Group in Germany.
At the newly created logistics hubs for Metro Cash & Carry and Real in Marl, gradually around 1,000 employees shall be working starting from Autumn 2017. All employees from the existing logistics locations in Essen, Kamen, Unna and Frechen will be offered jobs there.
