FedEx Express is to triple its presence at Milan Malpensa Airport with a 100 million euro ($112 million) expansion covering 35,000 square metres, to be completed mid 2016, offering the first daily courier connection from Italy to the US.
The expansion will consist of 15,000 square metres of warehouses, 20,000 square metres for vehicle manoeuvring and parking and 1,000 square metres of office space. FedEx says it is expecting to handle 20,000 daily shipments, there will be 44 weekly flights to and from Malpensa and 480 connections by land and the facility will employee 200 members of staff. Milan Malpensa Airport handles about 500,000 tonnes of cargo a year and hopes to increase its capacity to one million tonnes within the next two years. SEA Group, which operates Malpensa and Milan Linate Airport, will invest 15 million euros in the project.
SEA chief operating officer, Giulio De Metrio says Malpensa is showing strong growth and this is expected to continue. He says: “Malpensa is the first cargo airport in Italy and it handles 55 per cent of total Italian goods traffic. It is also registering the fastest growth in Europe … in the first eight months [of 2015] [cargo] got a further increase of 8.5 per cent compared to the same period of 2014.”
De Metrio continues: “FedEx … is the first courier directly connected with the United States thanks to the direct flight [from] Milan Malpensa [to] Memphis, the only express courier direct flight on this route that provides most fast transit times from Northern Italy to the entire North American market.”
FedEx managing director for properties and fleet for Europe, Middle East and Africa, Vito Bernardi says FedEx has opened more than 100 new branches in three years across Europe, the Middle East, Indian Subcontinent and Africa and hired 6,400 new members of staff. Bernardi says: “The recent investments of the company in Italy fall within the same strategy, with 24 new branches opened in less than three years, 300 jobs created, and the introduction of the first and only direct flight from Italy to the FedEx global hub in Memphis, Tennessee.”
