Deutsche Post AG and the German government Monday defended current mail prices as questions resurfaced about whether they should be lower.
The move comes five days after German regulators ordered the first stamp-price cuts in more than 50 years starting next year – a ruling that spurred the mail and logistics giant to say it would be forced to cut 10,000 jobs.
Consignia is to rethink its controversial plan to charge many customers pounds 14 a week to deliver post before 9am, its chairman said yesterday.
Allan Leighton said the pilot projects for the scheme would now examine the options of charging pounds 5 or pounds 10 a week.
Mr Leighton acknowledged that he had not been briefed on the pounds 14-a-week plan before news of it broke in the media this week.
He added: ‘We are having a rethink because I am trying to put a price increase through on stamps so that I can argue that the first class stamp is the best value you can get in Britain today.
Emirates Post officials recently met with representatives of international courier companies to discuss the new licensing system by which they can operate in the UAE.
Director-General Abdullah Al Daboos said the new system provides more facilities and privileges to investors to open courier service franchises here.He discussed queries raised by the representatives regarding the new system and noted Emirates Post will continue to support the courier service business for their smooth running.
Read MoreMILLIONS of letters and other items due to be delivered by the Royal Mail have been buried in landfill sites or discarded in rubbish skips.
Scotland Yard confirmed yesterday that it is investigating a mailing company for allegedly dumping hundreds of mail bags with household rubbish. Five people have been arrested and released on bail.
The company had been paid to transfer post from client organisations to the Royal Mail but detectives believe that clients were being charged for mail they never passed on, and that this was post which they believed nobody would miss, such as magazines and direct mail. It was then allegedly loaded into skips and dispatched to rubbish tips.
Read MoreThe Royal Mail yesterday staged an embarrassing climbdown over its plan to charge small businesses and householders £14 a week for early delivery of their post after its chairman said he had not been told about the scheme. Allan Leighton, chairman of Consignia, which is to revert to its Royal Mail name by the end of the year, said the postal service would now widen pilot projects to see if it could economically deliver small volumes of mail before 9am at £5 and £10, as well as £14, a week. The charges would have hit relatively small users of the mail. Anyone receiving an average of more than 20 letters a day would not be charged.
Read MoreJapan’s mail and postal savings services in fiscal 2001 recorded profits for the first time in four years, the Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications Ministry said Friday.
Mail services, including door-to-door parcel delivery, registered profits of 8 billion yen in the year that ended March 31, against losses of 10 billion yen the previous year.
Revenues from the mail business dipped 1.6 percent to 2.21 trillion yen, while expenses dropped 2.3 percent to 2.19 trillion yen.
China’s postal service will be merging e-mail and traditional mail to accommodate both the people with access to the Internet and those without.
Messages can be e-mailed to China Post for hand delivery – the message will then be printed out, placed in an envelope and delivered.
The number of Internet users in mainland China at the end of last year was 33.7m, which is still only a small proportion of the population.
Germany’s postal regulator has ordered monopolist Deutsche Post to lower its postage rates next year. The move will send the EU’s recent Post edict to the dead-letter file if the EU Commission allows the exchange-listed mail and logistics company to cut its stamp prices rather than repay to the German government 572 million ($566 million) in subsidies that were illegally diverted to its parcel delivery unit in the mid-1990s.
The subsidies in question took the form of overpriced postal rates, supposedly granted to help Post fulfill its public mission of countrywide letter delivery. But these profits were diverted to its parcel business, the Commission said, allowing it to offer its service at dumping prices without showing losses.
In contrast to Post’s letter division, its parcel unit is purely commercial. With an “aggressive rebate policy“ for certain commercial customers, Post was able to gain market share from such big rivals as United Parcel Service, which lodged the complaint.
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