
German Parcel Business: 38% Growth by 2005
“E-commerce will generate a boom in business for German parcels firms over the next four years and expand overall market volumes by about 38 percent, a survey commissioned by the country’s postal watchdog RegTP forecast. Some 819 million additional parcels and express or courier items were likely to be generated by online sales in the year 2005, the survey by specialist consultant Manner-Romberg Unternehmensberatung (MRU) found. This would then amount to about 28 percent of the total market volumes of some 2,915 million items in that year, it forecast. Excluding a substitution effect where parcels previously generated through traditional business channels were in future generated via the internet, the absolute number of additional e-commerce parcels would soar from 33 million in 2000 to 75 million in 2001, 172 million in 2002 and on to 819 million in 2005. ‘E-commerce will thus give such a boost to the courier, express and parcels market that by 2005 one in four parcels will have been generated by internet trading,’ MRU said.”