March 11 (SeeNews) - The Bulgarian unit of Romanian parcel delivery company Sameday expects its revenue this year to grow exponentially from 15.5 million levs ($8.7 million/7.9 million euro) generated in 2023, following a significant expansion of its operational capacity and logistic areas, CEO Radoslav Krumov told SeeNews.
At the end of last year, the company added two new warehouses in the capital Sofia and the south-central city of Stara Zagora, alongside expanding its main logistic hub in the northeastern city of Ruse, in response to a surge in shipment volumes between mid-November and end-December, Krumov told SeeNews in a recent interview.
Sameday's investments in the country exceeded 6.4 million levs last year, primarily allocated to expanding the network of easybox automated parcel lockers to up to some 440 sites.
In 2024, the company plans to invest more than 17.1 million levs in its Bulgarian operations, with 13 million levs earmarked for growing the easybox network, which currently serves 86 towns and cities in Bulgaria.
"The share of people using the locker network is much larger than we imagined. It turned out that the Bulgarian consumer is not as conservative as we thought. More than half of the shipments we deliver at the moment are to lockers," Krumov noted.
The remainder of the planned investments this year will go to optimise warehouse processes and implement new technology, such as purchasing an automatic parcel sorter to reduce processing time and boost sorting capacity.
Sameday, which also operates in Romania and Hungary, entered the Bulgarian market in late 2022.
"Our experience in Romania and Hungary helped us with best practices, with investments that we made from the parent company into Bulgaria, which had to be adapted to the local market. With these best practices, high investments and elaborate software that we use for our operational needs, we are able to fully respond and even exceed the expectations of the end users," Krumov added.
(1 euro = 1.95583 levs)