Latest news with #PostNord
Daily Mail
14-06-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
Last post for the letter as Royal Mail falls into foreign hands?
Prepare to say a long farewell to the birthday card, the thank-you note and the love letter. The get-well card is set for a terminal decline. Letter-writing has been a dwindling art for some time, but the takeover of the Royal Mail by Czech tycoon Daniel Kretinsky looks set to accelerate its demise. Home deliveries of letters are already ending in Denmark and being slashed in other countries in Europe as postal service owners seek to cut costs. Observers say Kretinsky will follow suit in the UK. Its fate was sealed earlier this month when Royal Mail's parent, International Distribution Services (IDS), de-listed from the London stock market. It marked the end of an era for Royal Mail, which was founded in 1516 under the reign of Henry VIII, and has now fallen into foreign hands following the £3.6 billion takeover bid from Kretinsky's EP Group. Investors in IDS who accepted Kretinsky's offer for their shares received their cheques in the post – but that could soon become a thing of the past. In Denmark, Royal Mail's equivalent, PostNord, will stop delivering letters to people's homes after 400 years at the end of December. Danes will be forced to rely on costly private companies instead. PostNord cited the impact of email and other electronic message systems on letter and card writing in its decision. Danish post boxes, which like Britain's are easily recognisable with their crown motif and striking red colour, will begin to disappear from streets this month. France is cutting back on letter deliveries too. State-owned La Poste sparked outrage earlier this year when it began to remove some of its 120,000 post boxes. Germany's Deutsche Post, owned by logistics giant DHL, in March revealed plans to slash 8,000 jobs, blaming it on dwindling letter volumes. In the UK, letter deliveries direct to people's homes began in 1661 when the first postmaster general was appointed by King Charles II. Today, under a set of rules known as the universal service obligation (USO), Royal Mail is required to deliver letters six days a week and parcels five days a week. But Royal Mail has said repeatedly that its letters business is costing it hundreds of millions of pounds a year. It has raised stamp prices by record levels despite outrage from customers. Under plans being considered by the postal regulator Ofcom, set to be finalised this summer, these obligations are being watered down. The Government will retain a golden share in Royal Mail following the Kretinsky takeover. Any changes to its ownership, tax residency or where its headquarters is will need Ministers' approval. Royal Mail is also under a legal obligation to have at least one post box within half a mile of 98 per cent of the UK population. Even so, there are fears that service will be eroded, causing huge detriment to communities. Andrew Griffith, shadow business secretary, said: 'Daily delivery days for rural areas are for many a lifeline. 'Cutting these back would be a 'death spiral' for the valued, door-to-door, universal service and a slippery slope to losing the post service altogether,' he said. Alarm is growing among business groups that rely on the postal service to send their products to consumers. Amanda Fergusson, head of the Greeting Card Association, which represents about 500 businesses, said higher stamp prices are leading to even fewer letters and cards being sent. She said: '62 per cent of people are sending few letters precisely because of rising prices.' A Royal Mail spokesman said: 'We remain committed to offering choice, value and a reliable service for all our customers.' Letter volumes have fallen from 20 billion a year at their peak in 2004-5 to 6.7 billion in 2023-4. Fans of the UK's much-loved red post boxes, many of which sport quirky knitted toppers depicting topical scenes, hope they will not disappear with letter deliveries. Robert Cole of the Letter Box Study Group said: 'Many pillar boxes have openings big enough to take small parcels.' He added that Royal Mail had started adapting them for this purpose, also using GPS and barcodes. 2nd class to be even slower Royal Mail has been given a slap on the wrist by its watchdog over plans to slash deliveries from next month. The postal service told businesses it would cut second-class services to just three days a week from July 7. But Ofcom told Royal Mail boss Emma Gilthorpe that 'no decisions' on approval had been made, adding: 'Any reference by Royal Mail to specific dates is premature.' Royal Mail has been trying out reduced deliveries in 37 towns and cities since February, affecting a million households. It wants to cut targets for first and second-class mail after facing fines for missing goals. Currently, it must deliver letters six days a week to all 32 million UK addresses. It has been lobbying to change this for nearly five years saying it costs up to £2 million a day, and is no longer needed with fewer letters posted. Ofcom will make a decision this summer.
Time Out
05-06-2025
- Business
- Time Out
Postboxes will no longer exist in this European country by next year
Have you sent your significant other a love letter recently, or posted a postcard to a long-distance friend? No, neither have we. The truth is that classic physical mail has been on the decline for decades, but not just because of a lack of letter-writing. While plenty of people still receive bank statements, bills, and local news on paper around the world, you can opt to do all that online, and Denmark, one of the planet's most digitalised countries, is officially calling time on its state-run postal service. PostNord has seen a 90 percent decline in letter volumes since the year 2000, and a 30 percent decrease in the last year alone – overall, that's a drop from 1.4 billion to just 110 million annually. So, after 400 years of service, it will no longer be delivering letters, and we can expect the country's 1,500 post boxes to gradually disappear from this month onward. The operator will still be available for parcel deliveries, and if you've already bought your stamps, those can be refunded. But, is there anything else to blame for this shift in habit? According to the BBC, the Postal Act 2024 opened up the letter-sending market to private operators, meaning the cost of postage leapt up. PostNord Denmark's managing director Kim Pedersen told local media that 'when a letter costs 29 Danish krone (€3.90), there will be fewer letters.' Fewer, but not none. While 95 percent of Danes use Digital Post, around 271,000 people still rely on physical mail. It's thought that elderly people, and those who live in remote areas will be impacted the most by the change. But PostNord (which also operates in Sweden) isn't the only European operator facing tough times. Germany 's Deutsche Post announced earlier this year that it planned on axing 8,000 jobs.
Business Times
02-06-2025
- Business
- Business Times
Should SingPost stop delivering letters?
MY APOLOGIES to arborists, but every two weeks, I make a disgruntled trek from my mailbox to the nearest rubbish bin. Directly from box to bin goes not just unsolicited flotsam – property agents' fridge magnets and handyman's flyers – but legitimate mail that I simply don't need in hard copy, like dividend statements, utility bills and government missives. Come next year, the Danes will be spared these mailbox-rubbish bin sojourns because Denmark's state-run postal service, PostNord, will no longer deliver letters. Instead, it will start phasing out the nation's 1,500 post boxes this month and focus on delivering parcels. This isn't a seismic development – since the turn of the century, Denmark has seen a 90 per cent decline in letter volumes. Even so, those who prefer to send a ransom letter the old-fashioned way still can, since the nation's letter market was opened up to private firms last year. Laidback kidnappers aside, fewer people are posting letters, globally. In Singapore, total domestic mail volume fell more than 40 per cent from 2020 to 2024. The overseas travails of our national postal service, Singapore Post (SingPost), are confounding, but there is some low-hanging fruit on the domestic front. Today, SingPost's post office network remains unprofitable, while operating profit from its local postal and logistics segment is down. So, it wouldn't be unfathomable for SingPost to get out of the local letter business entirely, given Singapore's high rate of technology adoption and a national system that has digitally consolidated the vital government services that citizens need. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up Currently, nationalisation has been ruled out, but tweaking the postal network and raising postal rates remain options. If rates are merely marginally raised, though, it would be challenging to strike a balance between the resulting fall in letter delivery demand and other costs that might not fall proportionately. SingPost's monopoly on basic mail services ended in 2007, and perhaps, other private players might be better equipped to sustainably price or subsidise local letter delivery. But if moving bits of paper around the country is financially or logistically unviable no matter which company attempts it, then this service should be treated like a public good and be funded publicly, or cease entirely. Truly important bits of paper could still be couriered like parcels and priced accordingly. When that happens, I suspect that many businesses will reconsider the need for hard-copy documents in a hurry. 'When a letter costs 29 Danish krone (S$5.69) there will be fewer letters,' PostNord Denmark's managing director said earlier this year. Indubitably, this change will require drastically reshaping SingPost's obligations as a public postal licensee. It would be a timely opportunity to re-examine what constitutes critical infrastructure in 2025. One might find that this nexus of national security has moved on to other infrastructure such as fibre-optic subsea cables and semiconductor plants. Consider how most of us were notified of Covid-19 vaccinations during the pandemic. During that pathogen-laden time, touching your mailbox would actually have been counter-productive. There is every chance that this measure might not adequately move the needle on the larger scale of SingPost's woes. If that were the case, that would also be instructive. For if the albatross and mispricing of letter delivery are not the biggest of SingPost's problems, it probably has other bigger and more intractable ones.
Winnipeg Free Press
28-05-2025
- Business
- Winnipeg Free Press
The community is not just the majority
Opinion Know your audience — every member of it. The City of Winnipeg is planning to remove its parking purchase stations, making those who want to park in the downtown use a smartphone app instead. But what if you don't have a smartphone? You can buy vouchers for parking in a limited number of locations — hardly an ideal solution. What's also important to think about in that equation is not who, like you, has a smartphone and the ability to use a parking app, but those who don't — and what it would mean to them. BROOK JONES / FREE PRESS The City of Winnipeg will remove its parking pay stations between July 2 and Aug. 31. That's worth thinking about, not only for parking, but even as people think about the future of the public service of Canada Post. Our national mail carrier is once again in labour trouble — and critical financial trouble as well — and is shedding users as a result of the variety of hurdles it's facing. As customers leave, the financial picture grows even more dire. An industrial inquiry into the service has come up with a variety of potential solutions to the fiscal problems, among them, ending daily delivery to residential customers (but keeping it for commercial customers). The belt-tightening would mean more community mailboxes, different delivery schedules and a resumption of small postal office closures, among other things. On the face of it, it probably looks attractive. After all, much more written communication is dealt with now over email than with paper, envelopes and stamps, and the vast majority of Canadians would probably respond to the loss of door to door delivery with little more than a shrug: flyers and direct advertising mail probably outnumbers arriving first-class mail by a handy margin. But that's not the case for everyone. There is still a significant minority that depends on paper mail as a public service — and just like removing credit card access to parking stations — see a critical loss in losing regular mail service. The national mail carrier for Denmark and Sweden, PostNord, plans to stop all lettermail in Denmark by the end of 2025, because users are dwindling and most services — including government services — are primarily available digitally. But that leaves a remarkable number of Danes — 270,000 people, or 4.5 per cent of the population — who still depend on lettermail out in the cold. As The Parliament Magazine points out, 'this includes the chronically ill, the elderly and people with disabilities. These groups are already at risk of social isolation, and cutting mail service could add one more factor.' Weekday Mornings A quick glance at the news for the upcoming day. The effect is much the same as the fallout from Winnipeg's parking app decision — yes, you can go to one of three locations and buy paper parking vouchers, so there is at least lip service to a workaround. But that hardly provides an equal opportunity of access to everyone who may need to park at places like the downtown Manitoba Clinic for a diagnostic medical procedure. Instead, the marginalized, quite simply, grow even more marginalized. And feel even more like they are not considered as a part of decisions that are meant to reflect the needs of the entire community, not simply what is the majority of a community at any given time. There's a clear message in that about lettermail, and about parking apps, and about any number of other decisions that may be made with the majority in mind, and the minority ignored. When you make changes to a public service, you have to consider not only the people that are happy to be under the new umbrella, but also the number that you're leaving out in the rain. Access means that you don't build more hurdles for those who already have them. The community is everybody.
Calgary Herald
21-05-2025
- Business
- Calgary Herald
Canada Post urged to end door-to-door mail delivery. What other countries have considered it?
Article content Denmark is the only country, at present, with firm plans to stop door-to-door postal delivery of letters. Article content Denmark's state-run postal service, PostNord, has announced it will stop delivering letters entirely by the end of 2025, terminating a 400-year tradition. It will include the removal of all post boxes and the cessation of all letter deliveries, meaning there will be no door-to-door postal delivery of letters anywhere in the country. Article content As digital mail services became established, the use of letters fell dramatically in Denmark, says PostNord. Letter numbers have fallen from 1.4 billion in 2000 to 110 million last year. Article content Public services send communications via a Digital Post app or other platforms. Bank statements, bills, and correspondence from local authorities are sent electronically, says PostNord, making the letter market unprofitable. Article content Article content So, instead, PostNord is switching its focus to parcel deliveries. It means 1,500 workers out of a workforce of 4,600 face losing their jobs. Article content What is the U.S. doing to increase post office efficiency? Article content The U.S. considered the end of door-to-door delivery around the same time that Canada started to ponder it, the Associated Press reported back in 2013. But the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) continues to deliver mail directly to homes in places where this service is feasible and well-established. Article content However, more centralized delivery is increasing, mainly through the use of cluster box units or curbside mailboxes in new developments. These centralized mailboxes serve multiple residences and are designed to reduce delivery costs and improve efficiency. Article content Meanwhile, the USPS is refining its service standards and delivery operations to improve efficiency and reduce cost. That includes allowing postal carriers to travel greater distances and consolidating processing centres, but these changes have not equated to ending door-to-door delivery completely. Article content Article content In the U.K., the Royal Mail is drawing attention to the courier option as a potentially better means for package delivery abroad, while also promoting a new service to send British-themed gift boxes that include a range of popular food items.
