The €3 duty moved China's parcels from the border to the shelf; now DHL is buying the shelf

A duty that reroutes parcels instead of stopping them

On 1 July the EU began charging €3 per item type on parcels under €150 from outside the bloc↗; nearly 5.9 billion low-value items had entered duty-free in 2025, about 12 million a day ¹. The charge is levied per customs line, not per parcel, and sellers are expected to pass it through ¹. It also vanishes the moment goods enter in bulk and sit on a European shelf ¹.

The platforms had months of warning and used them. Shein opened a 740,000 square metre hub near Wrocław in December; Temu targets 80% of European orders fulfilled from inside the EU, through ten of its own warehouses ¹. A duty you can route around by renting a shelf was never a wall; it is a moving van.

DHL is buying the layer those warehouses feed

Pablo Ciano, chief executive of DHL eCommerce, says Eastern Europe is the division's next acquisition ground↗, with fewer gaps left in the west ². The agreed Venipak purchase, pending approval, adds about 800 lockers and 25 terminals across Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia↗ ²³. Italy runs on a Poste Italiane locker joint venture and Iberia on a CTT partnership; in Britain, Evri and DHL's UK parcel arm now form one network moving more than a billion parcels a year↗ through 15,000 shops and lockers ²⁴.

The numbers behind the run: €6.9 billion in 2025 revenue, cross-border volume growing about 15% a year, and a stated goal to double revenue within five years ². In the United States the same division hands its last mile to USPS under a $10 billion arrangement ³. There it rents the domestic layer. Here it buys it.

Rival rails rise on the same volume

Since February, JD.com's JoyExpress has delivered for its own Joybuy platform in six countries from more than 60 depots, anchored by a 90,000 square metre hub in Oberhausen; Lalamove added same-day delivery in Berlin in May ⁵⁶. Joybuy's UK chief, Matthew Nobbs, is blunt: "We don't do any de minimus business"↗ ⁷.

Temu, Shein and peers took a record 5.3% of German online trade in the second quarter↗, over 16% of fashion, growing more than 20% in a market that grew about 5% ⁵.

No source in this coverage names DHL as a carrier for Temu or Shein; Ciano counts merchants and second-hand senders, not platforms ². What the record shows is two camps building on the same flow, one by acquisition and one by construction.

The volume lands where there is no slack

Europe is short roughly 502,000 truck drivers, a 13% bottleneck rate and the worst of the 18 markets the IRU tracks ⁵. Fashion returns, where the platforms are strongest, run 26 to 50% and sometimes 75%, doubling the handling per sale ⁵. Ursula von der Leyen pitched the duty as fairness for 30 million retail workers; the share data says the volume re-routed rather than stopped ¹⁵.

Sellers cash out while the window is open

Owners of local networks are selling into the land grab. Ceva absorbed Paack's French, Spanish and Portuguese units; InPost took Yodel and Spain's Sending; FedEx agreed a one-third stake in InPost ³. The risk in Ciano's spree is vertical: a platform that delivers for itself never pays a carrier. Watch the Venipak approval, the handling fee due 1 November↗, and the full tariffs that replace the flat fee in July 2028 ¹⁸.