Amazon opens new £107m distribution centre

Online retail giant Amazon has opened a new £107m distribution centre in Peterborough, which is set to create 1,400 jobs in the city.

The building, on Flaxley Road, is next to an existing site the company runs, which opened in 2010. It currently employs more than 1,000 members of staff.

The 690,000 sq ft site is part of the company's £40bn UK investment plan for 2025-27 and is expected to ship up to five million items a week.

Tomislav Batinic, Amazon's site leader, said: "This site is a complete reinvention of how we run part of our logistics operation, and a historic moment for Amazon. It is the first of its kind in the UK and the largest in Europe."

Nothing is shipped directly to customers from the new centre.

Instead, it holds products customers buy most often, such as household essentials like pet food and toilet paper, and feeds them out to about 20 fulfilment centres across the country, where they are combined with the rest of a customer's order for delivery.

It is the first of Amazon's One Distribution Centres in the UK, aimed at reducing "processing steps" and speeding up deliveries.

It has capacity to store 16 million items at peak, which the company said was roughly twice that of other sites.

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