New Zealand Post sees business mail as key to growth
New Zealand Post is more than stamps, envelopes and parcels these days.
The state-owned mail agency posted a 24% rise in after-tax profit in the last financial year, thanks to diversifying its business, NZ Post chief executive officer John Allen said yesterday.
Mr Allen was in Taranaki catching up with some of NZ Post’s 180 staff in the region, and some of the company’s big Taranaki customers.
While visiting the Taranaki Mail Centre in New Plymouth — which handles 35 million items of mail a year — Mr Allen said that despite the use of the Internet, business mail was becoming more popular.
Business mail helped NZ Post make an after-tax profit of $27.1 million for the year ended June 30.
“The key element of the profit is the growth of business mail — using mail effectively as a business tool,” he said.
NZ Post was working with many business customers to directly market their products and services to people through their mail boxes.
The service saw NZ Post helping businesses to identify potential customers who would most likely buy their products, and sending them personally-addressed mail.
“We also work with businesses who might want to communicate with a whole group of people, farmers for example, or a business that might have a particular product and want to send mail out to a certain socio-economic group.
“We are working with these businesses to make sure their mail is appropriately targeted.
“This is about information management and sophisticated data management tools,” Mr Allen said.
The notion that e-mail would destroy the old-fashioned tradition of sending and receiving physical mail, was not daunting the post company.
In fact, becoming technologically savvy had proved to be good for NZ Post’s business, he said.
The company owned or had stakes in four data, computer or e-mail marketing companies, including document management company Datamail and e-mail marketing company, Message Media.
The future of NZ Post was in integrating the physical distribution of mail with technology, Mr Allen said.
“We want to provide more sophisticated marketing and payment solutions to customers,” he said.
Growing NZ Post’s banking arm, Kiwibank, was another aim of the company for the future.
“Kiwibank is going stunningly well. Clearly, the bank will continue to grow and contribute to the overall performance of the group.”
Mr Allen believed the bank’s competitive pricing structure was attracting more customers.
The bank currently had 170,000 customers.
Last week, Kiwibank reported an improved annual net loss of $8 million for the year to June, compared with its $10.2 million loss the previous year when it was launched in February 2002.
