Kolonial. Does not double the capacity with a new warehouse: believes they can reach Kristiansand in 2022 – E24

– We accelerated construction in nine months. When the covid arrived, we quickly realized that plans had to be changed, Colonial boss Karl Munthe-Kaas tells E24.

Kaas and the property developers from Eneo Eiendom have lined up on the Lier lot, on the outskirts of Drammen. Near the highway, the e-commerce company will build a warehouse so that the company does not end up in the rush it experienced during the crisis, when it had capacity problems.

Kolonial.no has no physical stores and currently has a main warehouse in Lørenskog east of Oslo. When the new warehouse is completed in early 2022, it should be possible to handle a turnover of NOK 6 billion.

Although the company believes that demand is still more than sufficient in eastern Norway, the new warehouse west of Oslo will also provide new opportunities in terms of geographic coverage area.

Snus in Sørlandet

Munthe-Kaas won’t launch specific plans for when more customers will have access to its service, but says the new warehouse in Lier will get people “nosing around Sørlandet”.

– Is it true that people as far south as Kristiansand will be able to order at Kolonial.no next year or the year after?

– I don’t want to promise any dates, but it is very likely that residents of cities like Kristiansand will be able to order in Kolonial.no in 2022 via cross docking, in other words that trucks leaving Lier can be loaded into smaller vans somewhere place. in Sørlandet.

– But mainly we need more capacity in eastern Norway, says Munthe-Kaas.

– Does it mean that you build a new warehouse in eastern Norway where you prioritize growth, for example in western Norway?

– One does not exclude the other, but it is clear that this warehouse occupies a large part of our capacity.

Kolonial’s main competitor, Meny.no, uses the store’s premises as a warehouse and is therefore present in much of Norway with online purchases.

500 million

The crown crisis has meant that many e-commerce players have experienced growth rates that were thought to take several years to reach. The same applies to Kolonial.no, which estimates that it will have a turnover of just under two billion crowns in 2020, an increase of 800 million over the previous year.

Kolonial has signed a 15-year lease for the warehouse building that will cost the developer about $ 500 million to build.

– Don’t you bite too much when you increase the capacity so much?

– No, we will be approaching the maximum capacity of our existing warehouse next year, so there is no doubt that we need this new warehouse. If we continue to grow by more than NOK 800 million next year as well, we will reach full capacity by 2022, says Munthe-Kaas.

Promises stable jobs

Kolonial.does not characterize the new warehouse as “semi-automatic”.

– Does that mean you won’t need as many employees as in, for example, Lørenskog?

– There are still people who want to put the item in the box in our warehouse, but we seize the opportunity when we build a new warehouse to optimize the system, says Munthe-Kaas, who does not want to go into detail about the system that the company has developed.

Initially, there will be around 100 jobs, but at full capacity, there will be 500 jobs. It includes both collectors and drivers.

Until now, online grocery volumes in Norway have been too small for companies to make money from the business. For this reason, among other things, it is very important to speed up the picking of goods.

– These are stable and good jobs at an uncertain time, says Munthe-Kaas.