Now hiring: DPD bets big on online delivery market with 6,000 new workers and £200m spending spree
Delivery giant DPD is hiring 6,000 new workers in order to keep up with demand from “the biggest boom in online retailing in the UK’s history” as a result of the coronavirus lockdown.
The firm said it would also put £200m extra cash into its network, as part of an “unprecedented investment in our infrastructure and people”.
DPD believes that the current spike in demand for online deliveries is here to stay, and is subsequently hiring 2,500 people for full-time depot, hub, and management jobs.
On top of this, it hopes to enlist 3,500 delivery drivers, and spend £100m of its £200m investment on new vehicles.
DPD will also build 15 new regional distribution depots this year, 10 more than it had planned before the pandemic hit.
This will come in at a cost of about £60m.
It comes as a rare piece of good news for the UK jobs market, which has been beset by redundancies in recent months, after the pandemic and subsequent “stay at home” order from the government left many companies unable to pay their staff.
The delivery company is betting that despite the reopening of physical retailers at the beginning of this week, the massive growth in online deliveries brought about by the pandemic is “the new normal”.
“DPD has been one of the fastest growing major companies in the UK in the last 10 years, due to the growth in e-commerce,” chief executive Dwain McDonald said.
“But what we have seen in recent months is potentially a much more significant shift in behaviour, and we believe elements of it will be permanent.
“As a company, we’ve been dealing with rapid growth and ongoing investment cycles for a long time, but this is a very significant moment.
“I do think the high street will bounce back from where things are now, but we have to base our modelling on our conversations with retailers and their projections.
“It looks like there will remain a much greater reliance on e-commerce in the future – that’s going to be our ‘new normal’.”