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DHL Express France launches new domestic delivery service

Posted by | May 13, 2008 | |

DHL France has launched a new domestic delivery service “D12” for parcels and pallets to be delivered within France before 12 a.m. either within 24 or 48 hours to respond to customer needs for increasingly precise delivery times.

With “D12”, the shippers can rely on exact delivery times for delivery to French cities with more than 5000 inhabitants. The service guarantees delivery of parcels and pallets up to 1000 kg within 1 or 2 days according to the scheduled delivery times of DHL Express.

To use “D12”, DHL customers only need to paste a label on the urgent shipment to signal its priority. There is no need for any advance notice, and items will be picked up together with other national or European shipments and charged for in a standard way without a special invoice. With this label, the shipments have the priority at all stages including loading, transit and delivery. The “D12” shipments can be traced online including signed delivery confirmations and delivery times.

Patrick Aguirregaviria, managing director of DHL Express France’s parcel business, said: “The legal restrictions concerning the speed limits for vehicles in France have re-drawn the borders between courier and domestic express. The express operators have had to review their transport plan and have added surcharges to their service price. Parcel delivery is becoming an alternative but with a new demand for ensuring guaranteed delivery times which D12 responds to.”

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DHL plans new parcel products in Germany

Posted by | May 13, 2008 | |

DHL is responding to customer wishes in Germany by testing new parcel services and plans to simplify its portfolio by re-branding products from next January, a senior manager said.

One innovative new service was parcel deliveries in the evening, Uwe Brinks, managing director DHL Parcel Germany, told last week’s KEP Kongress in Bergisch Gladbach, near Cologne. The parcels company, with revenue of EUR 2.6 billion in 2007, is the German parcel market leader.

Research among 1,500 existing and potential B2B and B2C customers had shown that top priorities included high reliability, low damage, understandable products and good customer service based on “convenience”, Brinks said.

At the same time, competition was intensifying as more parcels operators broadened their portfolios towards a “universal” range of B2B, B2C and C2X products, he pointed out. All parcel operators were also affected by rising costs, he added.

In response to the changing environment, DHL Parcel Germany had adopted the slogan of “ Simple, Always, Everywhere”. In January 2009, it would simplify its complex product branding to “ DHL Paket” for deliveries within Germany, with various add-on options, and to “DHL Europaket/Weltpaket” for international parcels, Brinks said.

Availability was being enhanced with services such as 24/7 self-service parcel drop-off and collection points (Packstations, Paketbox), and parcel tracking by mobile phone.

The KEP Kongress, the 14th annual conference event for the postal, parcels and express sector, was organized by Hamburg-based Deutscher Verkehrs-Verlag.

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DHL Express Singapore renames product portfolio

Posted by | May 13, 2008 | |

DHL has completed an across-the-board portfolio renaming of its products in Singapore, part of the company’s global alignment of product portfolio, which began in January 2008 and is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

The move has enabled DHL Express Singapore to harmonise a variety of product names to a single set of standard and self-explanatory product names that reflect the time-specific nature of shipments to their destinations.

Customers can now choose product services that offer flexibility and reliability based on speed (choice of time-definite delivery), destinations (from major business centres to remote areas worldwide) and weight (from lightweight envelopes to heavyweight pallets).

– StartDay Express has been renamed DHL EXPRESS 9:00
– MidDay Express has been renamed DHL EXPRESS 12:00
– Worldwide Document Express and Worldwide Parcel Express are now DHL EXPRESS WORLDWIDE
– Import Express is now DHL IMPORT EXPRESS WORLDWIDE
– Economy Select and Value Heavy Weight are now DHL ECONOMY SELECT

The names of DHL JUMBO BOX, DHL JUMBO JUNIOR, DHL EXPRESS PALLET, DHL AIRCROSS, DHL AIRPORT TO DOOR EXPRESS and DHL BREAKBULK EXPRESS remain unchanged.

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Royal Mail to carry on fight for zonal pricing (UK)

Posted by | May 12, 2008 | |

Royal Mail is seeking a judicial review of Postcomm’s decision to reject plans for the introduction of a retail zonal pricing scheme.

As competition increases in the commercial postal market, Royal Mail proposed zonal pricing to reflect its obligation to deliver anywhere in the UK.

Royal Mail’s ‘zonal pricing’ refers to a system where senders of postal items would be charged variable rates depending on the geographic location of the recipients.

Direct mail and magazine printers have been eagerly watching developments as they could impact on the cost of campaigns

In most cases, the zonal pricing structure will make rates higher for deliveries to rural areas and lower for deliveries to urban areas and business districts.

The changes would affect the pricing structures of bulk mailers using Royal Mail’s Mailsort (120, 700 and 1400), Presstream and Walksort services, while not affecting the pricing for regular stamped mail.

Neither Postcomm nor Royal Mail would comment further, but the regulator said it had not ruled out any future moves towards zonal pricing and was open to alternatives that overcame the problems in the recent application.

Royal Mail already applies a zonal pricing structure to some of its independent agreements, under which it delivers mail the final mile for large customers and other postal operators.

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Disenchanted companies desert Royal Mail (UK)

Posted by | May 12, 2008 | |

Business customers are deserting Royal Mail and most firms do not find the postal group an efficient organisation to work with, a study by the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) for The Times has revealed.
The BCC sought the views of nearly 1,000 businesses throughout the country about their use of Royal Mail and their experience of the organisation.
Sixty-eight per cent said that they did not find the postal group to be a “professional, efficient organisation to do business with”; 55 per cent said that Royal Mail was less reliable than it was five years ago and only 8 per cent thought that it had improved.
In a striking example of how much electronic communication has hit the use of postal services, nearly 86 per cent of businesses said that they used the internet and e-mail for transactions that they would have put through Royal Mail five years ago.
The BCC survey comes as the National Federation of SubPostmasters (NFSP) gives warning today that 3,000 more post offices may be forced to shut if the Government withdraws post offices’ rights to handle benefits and pension payments through the post office card account.
Royal Mail is in the middle of a programme to shut 2,500 post offices in its loss-making network.
Subpostmasters will press the Government to renew the contract for the post office card account when it comes up for review next year.

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Vertis Optimal Postage Solution Launched For Direct Marketers

Posted by | May 12, 2008 | |

Vertis Communications launched “Vertis Optimal Postage,” a mailing solution that will provide marketers a guaranteed flat-rate postage and processing fee. This new service addresses rising postage rates across standard-class, letter-size mail, including handling and freight surcharges. The vision of Vertis Optimal Postage is to provide industry-leading, guaranteed-rate postal processing with the highest delivery predictability to Vertis customers.

The Vertis Optimal Postage solution applies a cost/benefit analysis to a historical compilation of each customer’s mail plan, unfolding the solution in three stages. The first involves data processing, including data hygiene and postal pre-sort to organize and combine addresses, adhering to postal regulations and maximizing postal savings. Secondly, Vertis will utilize either physical sortation – a standard sorting of mail directly from the data file into a mail tray – or co-mingling, a mechanical process that combines multiple finished mail pieces from many sources in order to obtain a greater saturation of zip codes. Finally, Vertis performs a logistical planning process consisting of destination entry or moving the mail to bulk-mail center (BMC) or sectional center facility (SCF) entry points, which may include co-palletization – combining trays to like destinations.

While there are three distinct ways for Vertis’ customers to save postage, the basic principal is the same: the more work Vertis completes ahead of time for the United States Postal Service, the greater the savings passed on to customers. Recent cost/benefit analyses of Vertis’ Optimal Postage solution have resulted in an average of 7.1 percent postage rate reduction, per piece.

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ABX Holdings reports first quarter results

Posted by | May 12, 2008 | |

ABX Holdings, Inc. reported first-quarter net earnings of USD 3.8 million, or USD 0.06 per common share, on strong revenue growth to USD 382.1 million, driven both by its acquired airline and air services businesses and its expanded charter fleet of Boeing 767 freighters. In the first quarter of 2007, ABX Holdings earned USD 4.3 million, or USD 0.07 per share, on revenues of USD 288.1 million.
ABX Holdings acquired the businesses of Cargo Holdings International (CHI) at the end of last year. The principal businesses of CHI include two independently certificated airlines, Air Transport International (ATI) and Capital Cargo International Airlines (CCIA), and a leasing company, Cargo Aircraft Management (CAM). Collectively, the CHI businesses contributed approximately USD 75.4 million, or 80pct of the year-over-year increase in ABX Holdings’ first-quarter consolidated revenues. Growth in ABX Air’s businesses, principally its air charter operations, provided the remainder of the revenue gain. The CHI businesses also contributed approximately USD 1.7 million in net earnings during the quarter, net of acquisition-related interest expense.
ABX Holdings’ pre-tax earnings declined to USD 6.2 million in the first quarter from USD 6.9 million a year ago. The decline principally reflects a USD 4.6 million increase in net interest expense associated with financing of acquired businesses and additional aircraft. EBITDA (Earnings before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization) increased 78pct to USD 36.8 million in the first quarter, compared with USD 20.7 million in the year-earlier period (see Reconciliation of EBITDA to GAAP Net Earnings at the end of this release). EBITDA is a non-GAAP measure of financial performance that management believes better reflects the cash-generating performance of asset-intensive, financially leveraged businesses such as ABX Holdings.

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