Sepomex will propose legislative changes.
The Mexican Postal Service (Sepomex) will submit an initiative to Congress to modify its legal status. It higlihts as an “elementary act of financial justice” that political parties and the national judiciary should pay for the postal services that Sepomex provides for them.
The proposal for the postal services law reaffims the postal service as a strategic activity reserved for the state in order to guarantee universal postal service in terms of accessibility and security. It also creates a regulatory body for postal activities.
It is also expected that these reforms will give greater management autonomy to Sepomex, and that it be allowed to establish, operate, and maintain its own database of all addresses in the country, and also to reduce its exclusivity on the handling of correspondence to items weighing less than 350 grams.
Gonzalo Alarcon Osorio, the director General of Sepomex, says that the organisagion needs to obtain more resources “in order to maintain universal service, provide commercial services that the market demands, have management autonomy that allows it to compete with the private postal operators, and offers postal services which meet international quality standards”.
Mr. Alarcon requested the deputies of the Communications Commission to include said project in this congressional session. Mr. Alarcon adds, “This would be ideal, although we know that tthey have a very tight legislative schedule and that they have priorities, but we believe that it is also a priority for our country to have a first world postal service.”
Postal activities in Mexico generate approximately 12.68 billion pesos annually. 3 billion of these correspond to postal services and correspondence, and the other 9.5 billion correspond to specialised “mensajeria” and small package services operated by domestic and foreign companies.
Deterioration
Among Sepomex’s weaknesses are the obligation to provide “social mail” at tariffs below their cost and, according to Alarcon, “a chronic shortfall of investment, amounting to approximately 40 million pesos per year, which has deteriorated its infrastructure and has prevented its modernization.”
In addition, it faces competition from the “parallel mail” operators who offer lower priced services in the most profitable market segments.
Another disadvantage faced by Sepomex is the obligation to transport mail for political parties and the national judiciary at no cost. Mr. Alarcon states that this service is very costly.
Mr. Alarcon adds that during last year’s elections, Sepomex handled 100 million pieces of additional mail one or two months before the election date, as a result of which “all the parties bombarded us, and we had the obligation to fulfill this very serious obligation, and this forced us to work overtime, and we believe that this financially unfair”.
Closing Offices
Sepomex is planning to shut down 500 offices whose operations are not justified according to cost-benefit analysis. The first 110 of these were shut down last month, and it is expected that the rest will be closed by the last quarter of this year.
These moves are part of the operational modernisation of Sepomex, and their purpose is to “reduce costs and avoid redundancy of infrastructure with Telecomm and other third parties”.
