Craig Guers, VP of Opus East, tells GlobeSt.com the lease-term is for 20 years. The location is situated on 60 acres at Allentown Crossings. "We're putting two sites together, because it's such a big facility," he says.

The new building will replace two smaller DHL sorting facilities here and become the key distribution center for the worldwide delivery and logistics company's network of 57 stations in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. It will support daily truck runs to 10 regional hubs across the US.

The facility will have a base footprint of 290,000 sf with an additional 200,000 sf of mezzanine workspace and 12,000 sf of office space. The infrastructure investment here is part of a $1.2-billion North American network expansion program launched by DHL in June 2004. Other components of the program include a new West Coast distribution center in Riverside, CA; the build-out of an expanded air and ground hub in Wilmington, OH; and the addition of seven regional sort centers.

Fred Beljaars, EVP for operations, DHL Americas, says in a statement, "The new Allentown facility will particularly benefit customers in Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Washington, DC, eastern Pennsylvania and New York, including Philadelphia and New York City, as well as parts of West Virginia and Massachusetts by providing an increase in throughput capacity and allowing for more rapid and the most accurate sorting of customers' materials through the use of state-of-the-art software technology and sort-system equipment."

DHL, which is headquartered in Plantation, FL, has annual revenues of more than $25 billion in 2003. It employs more than 160,000 and has an international network linking more than 220 countries and territories worldwide.