Online retailers give intelligent logistics a boost

A robot is moving goods in the warehouse in Huiyang city, South China's Guangdong province, Oct 17, 2017.[Photo/IC]

In a traditional warehouse, a clerk could usually sort through about 1,000 products, and 60,000 to 70,000 steps are required per day to walk around the warehouse. Now, thanks to the mobile robots, the clerk could sift through 3,000 products in the same shift, while only taking 2,000 to 3,000 steps a day.

Cainiao is not the only case. JD.com Inc, China's second-biggest e-commerce player announced last week it had completed the construction of its first unmanned warehouse.

Located at JD's logistic center in Jiading district, Shanghai, the warehouse covers a combined floor space of 40,000 square meters. JD said all operations in the warehouse are fully automatic, including receiving goods, storage, packaging and sorting. The warehouse's handling capacity is expected to exceed 200,000 orders per day.

In August, JD launched the first unmanned sorting center in Kunshan, Jiangsu province. The whole process, from parcel sorting to loading onto trucks, is fully automatic in the Kunshan center, JD said.