Hermes to expand warehousing capacity and hire 9,000 couriers

Hermes UK is to spend £100m expanding its warehousing capacity, as well as recruiting 10,500 new employees, to deal with the demand for e-commerce created by lockdown.

The Yorkshire-based parcels specialist has already spent some £30 million so far this year, opening an additional 90 new sub depots as well as acquiring vehicles and customer service technology.

Hermes said it would spend the money to “strengthen [its] infrastructure” and enable it to handle its predicted parcels volumes of 3.5 million items each day during the Black Friday and Christmas period – almost double the volume it handled last year.

The express parcel carrier is to recruit for 1,500 full-time staff, and a further 9,000 self-employed couriers across the UK.

Chief executive Martijn de Lange said: “The pandemic has expedited the already phenomenal growth of online shopping and we see no sign of this changing.”

Last month Hermes said it had opened ten new depots in response to continued growing demand for online shopping since lockdown began.