Allied Express has opened a 9,000-square-metre satellite depot in Melbourne to support the rapid volume growth its Victorian operations have experienced over the past year. The facility complements the company’s existing Broadmeadows hub, providing additional sorting, staging, and distribution capacity for Melbourne’s metropolitan and regional delivery corridors.
Expansion Details
The Melbourne satellite depot was required as Allied Express’s Victorian volumes outgrew the capacity of its Broadmeadows facility. Parent company Freightways Group confirmed the investment during its latest earnings update, noting that the new depot supports the infrastructure needed to sustain Allied Express’s growth trajectory without compromising service quality or delivery timeframes.
The facility handles overflow sorting and distribution tasks from the main Broadmeadows hub, with a focus on the oversize and bulky parcels that form a core part of Allied Express’s delivery mix. Items such as furniture, sporting equipment, appliances, and other goods that don’t fit standard automated sortation systems require more handling space per unit than conventional parcels — making dedicated depot capacity essential as volumes scale.
Volume Growth
Allied Express has recorded volume growth of just under 14 per cent year-on-year, with the growth coming from a combination of expanded business from existing customers, new client wins, and service improvements enabled by infrastructure investment. The company’s bottom-line growth has outpaced revenue growth, reflecting a disciplined approach to pricing and a focus on margins alongside volume.
Management has emphasised selectivity on new business to protect margins, implementing updated rate cards and margin models designed to target sectors that have historically been underserved by mainstream courier networks.
Market Positioning
The Melbourne expansion reflects a broader trend in Australian last-mile logistics where operators handling non-standard parcels — oversize, heavy, or awkwardly shaped items — are seeing outsized demand growth. As e-commerce continues to expand into product categories that were traditionally purchased in-store, the need for delivery networks capable of handling bulky goods reliably has increased.
Allied Express’s B2C oversize niche positions it in a market segment that avoids the highest competitive intensity, since mainstream parcel networks are typically optimised for small, uniformly shaped packages that move efficiently through automated systems. Items that don’t conform to those parameters — kayaks, flat-pack furniture, exercise equipment — require a different operational model, and Allied Express has built its network specifically for that purpose.
The Melbourne satellite depot joins Allied Express’s national footprint of facilities in Sydney (Bankstown), Brisbane (Archerfield), Adelaide (Royal Park), and Perth (Forrestfield), supported by more than 50 regional agency partners.