UPS Healthcare has announced its first dedicated healthcare logistics facility in Giessen, Germany, as part of an ongoing aggressive strategy to expand its global footprint. Due to open in early 2023, the facility will meet the needs of a growing and innovating market that requires advanced, temperature-controlled logistics.
“This new facility will serve some of the fastest-growing healthcare markets in the world,” said Wes Wheeler, president of UPS Healthcare. “By opening our first facility in Germany, we’re investing in our customers, whose latest pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device products require an end-to-end range of quality specialist storage and handling services.”
In 2021, UPS Healthcare invested in over 36,000m2 of cold chain storage and freezer capacity globally, including in newly dedicated and upgraded healthcare facilities in Poland, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, and Italy. These facilities add to the existing 1 million m2 of dedicated healthcare warehousing across 134 strategically located GDP/GMP compliant facilities in 30 countries.
The 24,680m2 GMP and GDP compliant space will house over 30,000 pallet positions capable of supporting storage of a range healthcare products at 2C to 8C, 15C to 25C and up to -20C degrees.
Strategically located, the new facility offers access to the fast-growing European healthcare markets, supporting pharmaceutical, medical device and biologics producers that increasingly need time-critical and temperature sensitive logistics for their products. The global market for biologic therapeutic drugs is set to increase from $285.5 billion in 2020 to $421.8 billion by 2025.
Its proximity to UPS’s European air hub at Cologne Bonn Airport and UPS Healthcare’s European hub in Roermond also provides customers with shorter domestic and global transit times, potentially increasing production windows and offers next-day delivery to 80% of Europe as well as access to major ports including Rotterdam, Antwerp and Amsterdam. The facility will also support Hospital & Pharmacy distribution across Germany.
This new facility is a part of UPS Healthcare’s continued investment in Germany, where it recently launched UPS Premier, a service that can prioritize and track critical shipments within 3 meters of their location anywhere in UPS’s global network.