News / Maersk to provide fulfilment services for Amazon from French warehouse 

© Frédéric Legrand |

Maersk is poised to carry out fulfilment services for Amazon from a large warehouse in northern France, according to a recent French media report quoting a senior executive at the US etailer. 

A spokesperson for Maersk told The Loadstar the company would be occupying 75% of a 100,000sq metre warehouse on a business park inDenain, but would not confirm Amazon was the customer. 

The spokesperson said Maersk planned to employ 430 workers at the site during the peak season (September-December) and 240 during off-peak periods. 

Asked why the company had outsourced fulfilment services to Maersk and not kept them in-house, a spokesperson for Amazon said: “Like other companies in the logistics sector, Amazon regularly works with third-party companies to complement its own sites.”

One example is a site near Douai, also in northern France, where ID Logistics opened a 70,000sq metre warehouse for Amazon in 2021, employing 500 staff. 

It is not known whether Maersk providing fulfilment for Amazon is a first.  A well-placed source told The Loadstar that, in addition to a 2023-2024 agreement between the two for the transport of 20,000 FFE containers using green biofuel through Maersk’s ECO Delivery ocean product offering, “it is very likely that [Maersk] is doing more for [Amazon] along the supply chain.” 

Maersk itself made a concerted move into the B2C ecommerce and fulfilment space in 2021, with two acquisitions in the US and Europe – part of an ambitious business strategy to develop an ‘end-to-end’ logistics offering encompassing ocean and air freight , forwarding and contract logistics to support customers’ supply chains. 

It spent more than $900m buying US firm Visible Supply Chain Management for $838m and netherlands-based B2C Europe Holding for $86m. 

At the time of the purchase, Visible SCM was handling 200,000 orders a day and enabling 200m parcels a year through its proprietary technology solutions, while B2C Europe’s offering consisted of labelling services, pick-ups, sorting parcels, linehaul and injection into the last-mile delivery network of 100+ carriers, including full returns logistics, in 35 European countries. 

2021 also saw Maersk acquire HUUB, a Portuguese cloud-based logistics start-up specialising in technology solutions for B2C warehousing for the fashion industry, as well as LF Logistics, a Hong Kong-based contract logistics firm with capabilities within omnichannel fulfilment services, e-commerce and inland transport in the Asia-Pacific region. 

Yesterday, The Loadstar reported how Amazon was now offering its sellers a fully managed end-to-end logistics service through Supply Chain by Amazon.