TNT Post wins major retail sector mail contract in UK
TNT Post UK has won one of the country’s largest individual mail contracts, to handle up to 180m mailpieces a year on behalf of retail giant Tesco. The company, part of Dutch postal operator PostNL, revealed today that its contract with Tesco began last month, and was awarded following a competitive process.
One of the “most sought-after” deals in the postal sector, TNT Post said it will particularly involve collecting and processing customer communications from Tesco’s grocery store loyalty card scheme, Clubcard, and for its financial services arm, Tesco Bank.
The Clubcard scheme alone sends out several mailings each year to more than 15m households.
Nick Wells, the TNT Post UK chief executive, said: “Winning Tesco as a client is a great coup for TNT Post and we are proud that our robust operational capability, combined with excellent customer service, and of course value for money, shone through in the tender process.”
TNT Post has been operating in the UK for eight years, and now handles more than 3.5bn items of mail each year.
Some of its major business clients include energy utilities Centrica, npower and EON, the banks Barclays and Lloyds TSB and the telecommunications firms BT and Sky.
End-to-end
Much of TNT Post’s business in the UK involves the downstream access market – collecting and processing mail on behalf of its clients before entering it into the Royal Mail network for the “last mile” delivery.
However, the company is preparing further trials on providing full end-to-end delivery services in the belief that eventually the UK government will remove the current barrier to competing fully in that market – Royal Mail’s VAT exemption on final mile delivery.
Today, the firm confirmed that it will launch its second end-to-end trial in West London in mid-April, following on from its “successful” trial in Liverpool in 2009.
The trial will be used to test delivery operations and analyse performance with the hopes of ultimately rolling out a broader end-to-end service.
Wells said: “TNT Post has built an excellent reputation for quality, innovation and providing choice for its clients. We now want to take those qualities and apply them to our own delivery service.”
The company stressed to Post&Parcel today that despite its trials, it cannot consider rolling out a full delivery service until the issue of value-added tax is addressed by the UK government. VAT is currently at 20% in the UK.
“We want to make a significant investment in infrastructure and create thousands of jobs in the UK, but the government is doing little to help us to do this,” said Wells.
“We need to government to announce that it is going to allow fair competition in the UK postal market by removing the Royal Mail VAT exemption on final mile delivery.”
