Why foreign parcel terminals are so expensive
The average price of a foreign-made parcel terminal is $10,000-15,000. That price comes from the fact that the parcel terminal was originally developed jointly by the Austrian automation company KEBA and the courier service DHL in Germany.
As a result, the terminal ended up with excessive technical and electronic specifications. The cabinet alone weighs nearly 5 tons, and, as you can imagine, the price reflects that. China, for its part, isn't inventing anything fundamentally new here, it's simply copying an existing design.
That's why Chinese-made parcel terminals, while cheaper than the Austrian ones, still end up unreasonably expensive, since they copy the same basic construction principles and components.
It's also worth keeping in mind that all the major parcel terminal manufacturers are foreign companies, which means exchange rates have a strong impact on price, on top of expensive shipping and customs clearance.
Because of how expensive it is, a parcel terminal's payback period stretches well beyond a single year, which makes investing in a network like this fairly questionable. On top of that, parcel terminals only work effectively when deployed at scale, meaning at least 50-100 terminal complexes across cities with a million-plus population.
Our approach to manufacturing parcel terminals
A parcel terminal built on a computerized locker is an affordable solution for courier and transport services and online stores. Because our equipment was developed by scaling up from an affordable automated locker to a full-featured computerized locker, or parcel terminal, we ended up with equipment that's 3-4 times cheaper than the alternatives. That created an attractive opportunity for investment: the payback period for our equipment is 6-9 months.
How we managed to lower the cost
We managed to reduce the cost of a parcel terminal without sacrificing quality through a number of decisions:
- designing an entirely new cabinet construction;
- moving away from expensive industrial controllers with excessive specs and replacing them with controllers of our own design;
- using affordable yet high-quality, reliable components, since what matters is reliability, not brand names;
- breaking away from established templates and developing new solutions instead;
- keeping the entire production cycle in Ukraine, which cut nearly all our costs;
- carefully selecting the right people for the team.
