The week that was: 1 July 2011
DHL to quit domestic market in China, Swiss Post launches personalised newspaper, and US mailers can check deliveries via Google… Welcome to ‘the week that was’ – Post&Parcel cannot believe we are now into the second half of 2011. Let’s hope the continued economic recovery leads to a positive final six months of the year for the mail and express industry.
Big news from China this week, where DHL looks set to pull-out of the domestic parcels market. After launching the domestic business last year, DHL Sinotrans – a 50-50 venture with China-based Sinotrans Air Transportation Development – looks to have called time on the failing unit. Last June, DHL Sinotrans set-up Sinotrans-Apex in a bid to develop its domestic express delivery business in China. But after a year of continued losses, Sinotrans said in a statement on Wednesday that it has sold its domestic operations to small Chinese courier firm Uni-top. Sinotrans blamed “overly fierce competition in the domestic courier service sector” for the poor financial performance of the venture and subsequent pull-out, adding that “foreign companies lack cost advantage”. According to the Sinotrans statement, the DHL-Sinotrans domestic delivery arm lost 99.2m yuan ($15m) as of the end of 2010, with no sign of improvement. When contacted by Post&Parcel, Deutsche Post DHL refused to comment.
Post&Parcel loves innovative ideas, so we were pleased to see Swiss Post pushing ahead with plans to launch a personalised newspaper. The company is expanding its retail portfolio with the creation of the daily newspaper for Swiss readers, available from the end of November. MyNewspaper enables readers to compile a personalised daily newspaper based on around 30 publications. Subscribers select the content they want on the MyNewspaper Internet platform, for example by area of interest, such as local news, economy, culture and sport, before Swiss Post print and deliver the product. As a part of the one-year pilot project, MyNewspaper will also be available in an online format in Germany. Head of press/publishers at Swiss Post International, Carsten Vossmeyer said: “This means that readers can combine information from different publishers, depending on what they are interested in and their reading habits.” Swiss Post confirmed that readers can determine the number of pages they receive, with 24, 36 or 64-page options available. MyNewspaper will be digitally printed at Swiss Post Solutions in the Härkingen mail centre in Switzerland, before being delivered by Swiss Post.
Another dollop of technological genius coming up! Mailers in the United States can now check the status of their letters and parcels on Google Maps – and can even monitor their deliveries down to a street-by-street level. New Jersey-based firm GrayHair Software has integrated its existing mail tracking services with the Google Maps API, connecting its reporting engines with internet search giant’s satellite-based mapping system. GrayHair said customers using Intelligent Mail barcodes on their mailpieces can follow their items through the postal stream with the new tool, as pinpointed on Google Maps. As well as helping to remove bad data from a mailer’s address database, the new service allows use of radius mapping. This allows mailers to see for themselves the results of a mailing job, as plotted on maps local to one of their stores or branches – helping with planning for expected responses and future campaigns. GrayHair said scanned information can be checked in real-time, although the Google images themselves are not yet quite as up-to-date as the mail data. Director of marketing Bobby Tiedeken told Post&Parcel that as Google Maps develops as an application, using more real-time satellite imagery, the link-up would eventually allow mailers to go even further in determining reasons for the success or failure of deliveries to reach certain addresses. “Google is getting closer and closer to being live time,” he said. “Currently their images are about three months behind, but when it becomes live, our customers will be able to check what happened to certain addresses. It could help when natural disasters occur or other problems in the mail.”
And finally…
Don’t forget, if you missed the informative World Mail & Express Europe conference in Brussels this May, you can now find videos of key speakers in our videos section »
