The German group Deutsche Post DHL, the global logistics and transport giant with a 2013 turnover of over 55 billion euros and almost half a million employees in 220 countries, lands in Rome. To be precise in Pomezia, 25 km from the capital, in the heart of the second most important pharmaceutical hub in Italy after the one in Lombardy, where DHL Supply Chain Italy (turnover 320 million, 773 employees) recently inaugurated a new hub avant-garde for logistics and distribution throughout the Center-South.
“Rome and the Centre-South – he explains Eddy De Vita, president and CEO of DHL Supply Chain Italy – currently make up 7,8% of our turnover, but we want to reach 20% soon”. The new campus, which has been operational for a few weeks, will also serve this purpose, which will relocate part of the huge logistics traffic managed by DHL on the national territory to a total area of 92.000 square meters (it will be the second largest after the one in Settala, near Milan). and which will enhance – through an investment of 30 million euros – a local excellence, namely the pharmaceutical district.
First of all by creating new jobs linked to a sector which, in Lazio, has seen businesses grow by 18,7% in the last ten years and which produces 20% of the national total, with some emerging excellences such as the Okairos laboratory which between Naples and Pomezia is experimenting with the Ebola vaccine: There are currently 200 employees on the Pomezia campus (half of which involving local cooperatives), but we expect to add another 30-40 by the end of the year to reach 600 by 2017. And then there's the turnover: DHL Supply Chain works in Italy with 50 pharmaceutical companies (the Italian ones are 30% of the national market and 80% of the biotech one), of which a dozen are already customers of the new center in Lazio, and manages every year 1 million and 800 thousand orders for deliveries: "Of these orders - explains the vice president Vittorio De Amici - the vast majority will continue to be worked in the North, but from here we can reach 250 thousand a year".
“Throughout Italy – continues De Amici – our logistics network is needed 2.000 hospitals (half public, half private) with approximately 450 shipments a year 20.000 pharmacies, hundreds of wholesalers and we also do 250 home deliveries of devices". The new area therefore serves to store enormous quantities of drugs arriving from large multinationals such as AstraZeneca but also from local laboratories or from other nearby centers such as the Abruzzo-based Dompé, and to distribute them throughout the Central and Southern Italy. received by midday, by the following morning”, explains De Amici, “guaranteeing maximum attention in conservation (at the right temperatures for each category of drug), in transport (strictly, as far as possible, on road, to guarantee cells with temperatures and the appropriate conditions) and in the delivery".
To ensure this, the subsidiary DHL has been part of the Deutsche Post Group since May 2011 Eurodifarm, an Italian specialist in the distribution logistics of pharmaceutical, diagnostic and biomedical products at controlled temperature. In recent years, Eurodifarm has developed a capillary distribution network which today makes use of 4 hubs and 18 regional platforms, 44.250 m1.000 of covered area and over XNUMX refrigerated vehicles capable of maintaining the cold chain and the integrity of the product in every transport stage. “But we don't just do transport – the vice president of DHL Supply Chain Italy points out -: we take care, for example, of storage, monitoring and classification of products, co-packing, debt collection, customer care”.
A set of services that will now see the growing reality in Lazio at the center of the business: “DHL Supply Chain – concludes the managing director De Vita – covers 60 countries, a distribution area of 23 million square meters, but it wasn't obvious to convince her to focus on Rome and the Center-South in a period like this".
