Chinese Chamber Tours Postal Sorting Centre in Bettembourg

On Monday 10 November 2025, the China-Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce (ChinaLux) organised a tour of the POST Luxembourg Sorting Centre in Bettembourg.

Around 50 people participated in the event which was organised due to the growth in the e-commerce sector.

Jacques Bortuzzo, Chairman of ChinaLux, welcomed all participants who had all been kitted out in high-visibility jackets.

Mario Treinen and Xavier Kieffer, Directors at POST Luxembourg, explained that the location is currently used as Luxembourg’s national sorting centre for both parcels and letters. It will soon be temporarily rehoused as a new €80 million 40,000 m2 sorting facility is being developed, to come into operation in 2028. They also mentioned participating with POST in last year’s trade mission to China and added that the company is evolving from deliveries to eCommerce solutions.

The tour explained that the first stage of sorting is done by hand, stopping at 21:00, and involves separating letters from parcels, etc., with the second stage involving machines reading addresses (using OCR technology) and sorting automatically (30-40,000 letters/hour), with just around 5% of handwritten envelopes needing to be encoded manually.

The third stage involves registered mail where scanning is done manually, with circa 20,000 registered letters processed daily.

The sorting centre processes around 30-40,000 parcels daily, with just over 8.5 million parcels sorted in 2024, up 17% from 2023.

400,000 letters are sorted daily, of which approximately 25% come from abroad, with an annual drop of around 8% annually, with a decrease in bank statements being one of the main reasons.

The tour groups learned that there are also nine regional distribution centres (for letters and parcels) across the Grand Duchy (with another two centres dedicated to parcels), of which one is located in Bettembourg, within the same sorting complex. Each street in Luxembourg has its own manual sorting booth in which each building has its own separator, from where the day’s postal deliveries are sorted to be later collected by the postmen/women who normally start work daily at 06:00, leaving to start deliveries at 08:00 (they do not ring doorbells before that time). Normally less than 3% of deliveries are returned each day, due to a variety of factors.

Also included at the distribution centre are magazines, etc., which are received in bulk along with lists of recipients with addresses, as well as publicity mailings - the specifics here include utilising a system of dots indicating how many addressees per building are to receive them. Interestingly, when the system changed a few years ago from indicating if one DOES NOT want to receive advertising, to where one DOES want to receive advertising, the percentage dropped to 30%.

The tour also discovered that currently 60% of postal delivery vans are electric vehicles, with the aim to get to 100%.

On the quality side, POST Luxembourg offers a 99% same-day or next-day parcel delivery service.

The guided tour was followed by an external networking dinner at the Restaurant Belle-Vue in Kayl.