SATS-owned Worldwide Flight Services (WFS) has opened a 25,400 sq m cargo terminal at Lyon-Saint Exupéry Airport, centralising its Lyon operations at a single site directly connected to the airport's runways.

The Aéroport de Lyon DC1 facility sits in the airport's Cargoport zone — France's second-largest air cargo hub — and consolidates handling that WFS previously spread across multiple locations in the city. It becomes WFS' second-largest operation in France after Paris Charles de Gaulle.

The spec sheet targets high-value, temperature-sensitive freight. The building includes 4,400 sq m of cold rooms for specialised and sensitive cargo, capacity suited to perishables storage, and 36 door docks handling imports and exports, five of them dedicated to airfreight pallet transfers. The layout is designed to optimise flows between landside access points, handling areas and airside operations.

For shippers and forwarders, the investment is aimed squarely at the Lyon region's dense cluster of healthcare, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. WFS says the facility will serve all 380 of its Lyon-area customers with strengthened capacity for sensitive and high-value consignments.

Laurent Bernard, vice-president of WFS France, called the terminal "a new milestone for WFS in Lyon, where we first commenced operations in 1971."

"Its design, temperature-controlled areas, and organisation of cargo flows enable us to strengthen our capacity and operational efficiency to handle sensitive and high value goods for our airline and freight forwarder customers," Bernard said. "Given Lyon's strategically important location, industrial base, and high-value economic sectors, this new generation of logistics infrastructure reinforces Lyon's position in national and European logistics flows and will strengthen the economic attractiveness of the region."

The project brought together four parties: Aéroports de Lyon as airport authority, WFS as operator, Prologis as developer of the logistics real estate, and the em2c Group as design-build contractor with technology oversight.

Vincent Sadé, vice president and head of capital deployment France at Prologis, said the deal reflects how the developer's business is changing. "Aéroport de Lyon DC1 illustrates how our business is evolving: beyond the building itself, we design infrastructure that is directly integrated into our customers' operations," Sadé said. "Our role was to align the specific constraints of the airport environment, real estate requirements and WFS's operational needs to create a tailored, high-performing solution built to last."

Yvan Patet, president of the em2c Group, said the facility "stems from a shared vision among regional and international partners driven by a desire to strengthen the region by incorporating environmental performance from the construction phase onwards. This facility provides a solution tailored to the specific requirements of air freight."

Sustainability features were embedded from the design stage. The terminal targets a 'Very Good' BREEAM rating, and its roof is engineered to accommodate a future photovoltaic installation.

Cedric Fechter, chairman of the management board of Aéroports de Lyon, framed the opening as part of a broader freight build-out. "The Aéroport de Lyon DC1 facility marks the continued expansion of Cargoport, the freight zone at Lyon-Saint Exupéry Airport and France's second largest air cargo hub," Fechter said. "The result of close collaboration between Prologis, the em2c Group, WFS and Aéroports de Lyon, this project epitomises regional supply chain and significantly strengthens the competitiveness of the region."

The Lyon opening extends WFS' European network push, which has recently included a renewed cargo handling contract with China Eastern at Stockholm Arlanda and a new cargo handling licence at Oslo Airport — a capacity build-out that handler-dependent carriers and forwarders will watch as pharma and perishables volumes continue to concentrate around temperature-controlled gateways.