Less-than-truckload (LTL) carrier and warehouse operator Averitt Express announced on May 29 that it has opened an international distribution center near the Port of Savannah, Georgia, to manage the expanded volumes moving through the fast-growing container port.
The Averitt facility encompasses 123,000 square feet, of which 80,00 square feet is allocated to warehousing and distribution, the privately held Cookeville, Tennessee-based company said. By contrast, Averitt’s former Savannah facility, where it operated for more than 20 years, totaled just 9,100 square feet.
The new facility will support services such as transloading, inventory management, order fulfillment and intermodal transportation, Averitt said. The company has recently opened facilities in Jacksonville, Florida; Nashville, Tennessee; and Austin, Texas.
The country’s fourth-busiest container port, the Garden City terminal is also North America’s busiest single-terminal container facility. Goods moving through Garden City can reach 44 percent of U.S. consumers in two to three days, according to the Georgia Ports Authority, which owns and operates the port.
Garden City has defied the recent weakness in global trade by virtue of its strong value proposition and the impact of the expanded Panama Canal, which has compelled importers to schedule Asian import traffic bound for East Coast markets over an all-water route instead of to West Coast ports and then by rail or truck to their destinations.
Through April, total volume at Garden City hit 1.51 million twenty foot equivalent unit (TEU) containers, up from 1.391 million TEU through the same period in 2018.
