Liege Airport

Cainiao Network, Alibaba Group’s logistics arm, said in a recent statement that it will work with local partners to create 200 jobs for its smart-logistics hub at the Liege Airport in Belgium’s Wallonia region.

• The new hires will work at a 33,000-square-meter warehouse, which is under construction and due to open later this year. The warehouse is part of a larger hub that Cainiao plans to construct across 220,000 square meters at the airport.
• The smart-logistics hub is one of the outcomes from the Belgian government’s 2018 agreement to join an Alibaba-led initiative called Electronic World Trade Platform (eWTP), which aims to lower barriers to global trade for small and medium-sized businesses via e-commerce.
• As part of the initiative, Cainiao said that it will invest 100 million euros in building the smart-logistics hub and create 900 jobs over the duration of the project.
• Cainiao operates around 18 cargo flights a week during the daytime and 60 trucks per day on average, to and from Belgium, as well as a railway network extending to Zhengzhou, Henan and Yiwu, Zhejiang in China.
• Cainiao worked with local engineers to make the hub environmentally friendly. Following European environmental standards, Cainiao installed solar panels to reduce energy consumption and came up with a design that ensures rainwater discharge while protecting groundwater resources from pollution.
• Following the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the logistics hub helped in the fight against the virus in Europe by enabling the efficient international transport of donated medical supplies to a number of European countries.
• By 2036, Alibaba Group aims to create 100 million jobs globally and provide the infrastructure to help 10 million small businesses to become profitable on its platforms.

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