Recently, Jingzhou was awarded China’s Role Model City for Courier Services. This promoted the high-quality development of the courier industry of Jingzhou and boosted the construction of a demonstration zone for high-quality development in the Jianghan Plain.

At the construction site of the Jingzhou YTO Concentrated Transportation Center, the main structure of the first phase was under construction, and it consisted of an intelligent parcel processing center, an intelligent storage center, and an e-commerce center. With an area of 178 mu, the project is located on the east side of Shanghai Avenue in the Jingzhou Economic & Technological Development Zone. After the first phase is put into operation, the center can accommodate 600-800 employees and process 1.4 million parcels per day.

In the JD Warehouse of the Central China (Jingzhou) Logistics Park, there is a fully automatic assembly line where tons of goods are stacked up by robotic arms. After the goods are put into the warehouse, there is less manual labor in distribution, sorting, packaging, among other processes, and a significant increase in processing efficiency. Currently, the JD warehouse has a daily processing capacity of 200,000 parcels, which doubles that of the previous one.

The courier industry of Jingzhou is robust enough for Jingzhou to be recognized as China’s Role Model City for Courier Services. At present, there are seven leading courier companies such as China Post and ZTO, 12 e-commerce clusters and nine e-commerce companies with annual sales exceeding RMB100 million, which ensure a top three ranking for Jingzhou in Hubei in terms of mail volume and growth. The total mail volume is 450 million pieces. The courier industry focuses on courier services across the city and extends them to 26 prefecture-level cities within a radius of 300 km from Jingzhou with a population of around 120 million, and 66 prefecture-level cities within a radius of 500 km from Jingzhou with a population of around 300 million. Seven major distribution centers extend services to five cities in Southwestern Hubei, with a mail volume amounting to nearly one billion pieces. The four-level (city-, county-, township-, and village-level) delivery network extends to all parts of the city with more than 1,600 service points.

At present, there are 15 courier brands, 63 companies with legal personality, 77 branches, and 1,467 service points. This represents the preliminary shaping of a courier network featuring multiple ownership systems, multiple entities which compete and cooperate with each other, and multi-level services. Such a network can better drive the coordinated development of the upstream and downstream of the courier industry and has become important to connect production with consumption, pave the way for macro- and microcirculation, and build a modern distribution system.