PD Ports and Tesco Announce Major Development Plans800 New Jobs to the UK

London, 2 May 2008 – PD Ports and Tesco today announced plans to bring 800 new jobs to Teesside, through the development of a state-of-the-art import centre.

Announcing the plans, Tesco Corporate Affairs Manager Juliette Bishop said:

“We are delighted to announce the development of our first purpose built import storage facility at Teesport in the North East of England. This will be part of what will be a very exciting project for Teesside. The import centre will create 800 jobs for local people and we hope it will help to attract other investment to the area.”

The new 1.2 million sq. ft. (110,562 sq. mts.) high bay import centre will be located on brownfield land which is currently undeveloped within PD Ports’ Tees Dock estate, beside the future Northern Gateway Container Terminal.

Juliette Bishop, continued; “At Tesco, we regularly review our distribution network to ensure we can deliver the very best service to stores and our customers. Our non-food business is expanding each year with a significant proportion of our hard-lines stock, such as electrical goods, imported from the Far East and this requires the levels of stock that we need to hold to be higher than for other areas of our business.

We need to increase our storage capacity to deal with the increased levels of imported containerised goods and building a storage facility at the port removes the need to move stock from the port where it is imported, to a storage facility inland. As well as reducing the double handling of imported stock, this will help to reduce the road miles that products travel, which is better for the environment.”

Tesco will start construction of the import centre this summer and hopes to operate from the site towards the autumn of 2009.

"We will be making further announcements about our plans, including the jobs that this development will create in due course. At this stage, however Tesco is looking forward to playing a key role, working with the local councils and organisations over the next year to make the most of this much needed investment to the area."