Mail traffic falls as portugal embraces electronic messages
Increasing numbers of people in Portugal are using web cards, e-mail and mobile text messages to keep in touch with friends and family, prompting a decline in traditional mail traffic.
During the last two months of 2002, usually the post office’s busiest period due to the Christmas holidays, mail volume fell by four million pieces to 273 million when compared to the same time in the previous year.
“It has not been an easy year,” said the spokesman of state postal service company CTT, Antonio Goncalves da Cunha.
The decline in holiday mail traffic is part of a wider pattern of declining use of postal services.
One in five Portuguese never post letters and nearly half, 47 percent, send one or fewer letters each month, according to a study carried out by Portugal’s telecommunications regulator ANACOM in 2001.
But while penned letters are on the decline, the popularity of e-mailed web cards has soared.
Portugal’s most popular e-greetings portal, Alice.pt, said it sent 500,000 web cards in December, three-quarters of them holiday related, and could have sent 50 percent more if it had extra bandwidth in place to accommodate the extra traffic.
Manuel de Freitas, the director of 20/20 Multimedia which runs Alice.pt, said people are gradually replacing the tradition of sending paper cards at Christmas or other special occasions with the habit of sending electronic greetings, which are easier to send.
“Paper cards, mobile cards and web cards are all perfect substitute products – -if one goes for one type, the other types lose,” he said.
With growing numbers of people owning a home computer and going online, telecoms analysts say the trend away from traditional mail will continue.
The percentage of Portugal’s 10 million residents with access to the Internet climbed to 46 percent by the end of September from 30 percent in the same year-ago period, according to ANACOM figures.
Sending and receiving e-mail was the favourite activity of 70 percent of Portuguese Internet users according to a government study published at the end of 2001.
Those who are not yet online still have the option to send mobile text based cards and messages, which have surged in popularity in Portugal over the past three years.
Portugal has one of the highest rates of mobile ownership in the 15-member European Union, with more than eight million portable phone owners.
And each Portuguese mobile phone owner sent an average of 40 text messages a month last year, compared to just three in 1999.
The popularity of e-greetings was especially evident over the holiday peirod, when Portugal’s three mobile operators reported a surge in data traffic.
TMN, the nation’s largest mobile carrier, reported its more than four million clients sent 26 million text messages on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, a 50 percent increase over the same period last year.
The number of text based mobile postcards meanwhile, which include images along with written messages, that the company processed on those two days trebled in comparison with the daily average.
Across Portugal 51 million text messages were sent on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, overloading the system and causing messages to take hours to reach their destination.
“Text messages and cards began by functioning as a complement to cards at Christmas but at some point they have gradually started to substitute them,” said TMN marketing director Margarida Cunha.
