Tesco is to build a 1.2 million square foot import centre at Teesport ready for operations in the autumn of next year.
Corporate affairs manager Juliette Bishop said: “We are delighted to announce the development of our first purpose built import storage facility at Teesport in the North East of England. This will be part of what will be a very exciting project for Teesside. The import centre will create 800 jobs for local people and we hope it will help to attract other investment to the area.”
The high bay import centre will be located on brownfield land which is currently undeveloped within PD Ports’ Tees Dock estate, beside the future Northern Gateway Container Terminal.
Bishop said: “Our non-food business is expanding each year with a significant proportion of our hard-lines stock, such as electrical goods, imported from the Far East and this requires the levels of stock that we need to hold to be higher than for other areas of our business.
“We need to increase our storage capacity to deal with the increased levels of imported containerised goods and building a storage facility at the port removes the need to move stock from the port where it is imported, to a storage facility inland. As well as reducing the double handling of imported stock, this will help to reduce the road miles that products travel, which is better for the environment.”
PD Ports has been promoting the concept of portcentric logistics – locating the storage and distribution of imported goods close to the point of arrival at a UK port – for some time. In 2006 ASDA Wal-Mart opened a 350,000 sq ft import centre at Teesport and has saved more than two million road miles by adopting the portcentric concept.
The Northern Gateway Container Terminal is a new deep sea container terminal planned at Teesport on the South side of the River Tees. The £300 million development will have a capacity of 1.5 million TEU and is expected to deliver over 5,500 jobs to the Tees Valley.
