Tag: Business Post

Business Post launches i-mail

Posted by | Sep 20, 2007 | |

Business Post’s UK Mail business has announced the New Year launch of its i-mail next day service in a partnership with Royal Mail. Business Post customers will be able to send an electronic copy of a letter or document to one of Royal Mail’s sort centres where it will be printed, sealed and transferred to Royal Mail for final-leg delivery.

Business Post says prices for the new service will start at less than the price of a first-class stamp, including stationery and printing. It claims the agreement makes UK Mail the first private organisation to provide an alternative next-day service to nationwide addresses. Customers will be able to send mail as late as 6pm to secure next-day delivery.

“We’ve been looking at it a little while,” says head of group marketing Nigel Proctor, who adds that the group has been in talks with Royal Mail for around eight months. In-house trials of the service will begin next month and software developments are in place with a third-party provider.

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UK Royal Mail faces further strikes in October

Posted by | Sep 20, 2007 | |

Britain’s state-run postal service, Royal Mail, is facing two further strikes after the Communication Workers Union (CWU) announced dates for industrial action in a dispute over pay and working conditions.

“The Communication Workers Union is announcing today that there will be further strike action in response to Royal Mail’s draconian and destructive proposals on pay and business changes,” the union said in a statement.

The CWU said in June its members had voted in favor of industrial action due to Royal Mail’s “below inflation pay offer” and its plans to reduce the workforce by around 40,000, or about 27 percent, by automating mail-sorting processes.

Royal Mail said it remained willing to talk to the union but needs to modernize to prevent the business from failing and that the only way it could improve pay, protect pensions and deliver customer service was by modernizing.

“It is clear from our discussions that the CWU leadership does not begin to understand the challenges facing Royal Mail and the very serious consequences for the business if we do not push ahead and modernize,” Royal Mail said. The company is fighting private competition from Business Post, Dutch mail company TNT NV and others after losing its 350-year monopoly on postal services last year. The growth of email, text messages and the purchase of vehicle tax discs and television licenses online have also dented profits. The union said it would hold 48 hour strikes on Oct. 5 and 6 and Oct. 8 and 9.

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TNT uses strikes to put pressure on Royal Mail

Posted by | Jul 11, 2007 | |

TNT said the wave of industrial action hitting Royal Mail underlined the need for it to develop a full-blown rival service.

The Dutch-owned company, which uses Royal Mail to provide “final mile” postal delivery, said its customers were suffering disruption from the action by the union but it would not be suing the Post Office because it accepted that the state-owned group was protected by “force majored” contractual clauses.

TNT is the only company known to have been developing concrete plans to launch a complete rival service including the use of its own postal delivery staff. Its British boss, Nick Wells, said the impetus to proceed with such a project was higher than ever.
TNT has been undertaking full-scale trials of next day door-to-door deliveries in Glasgow and Manchester although the vast bulk of its daily mail is distributed to homes through Royal Mail under the specially licensed “final mile” system used by several private operators.

TNT’s group chief executive, Peter Bakker, said recently that Britain was one of its most important markets, showing healthy growth. The company is distributing more than 1 billion items of mail a year in the UK and many customers have migrated from Royal Mail, including telecoms group BT, which recently signed a contract worth up to £ 90m.

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Business Post steps up pressure on Royal Mail

Posted by | Jul 10, 2007 | |

Business Post, the postal services company, said its turnover had risen 13 per cent in the first quarter of 2007 compared with the same period last year.

In an interim management statement ahead of Tuesday’s annual general meeting, the company said its struggling parcels business was “making progress in an increasingly competitive market” while other parts of the business were performing strongly.

Business Post’s parcels contract with Federal Express, worth about GBP 20m in revenue and GBP 2m in operating profit, was terminated on April 30. If the revenues from this contract were excluded, the company’s underlying revenue increase for the first quarter would have been 18 per cent, the company said.

More than 10 per cent of the 20bn items posted each year in the UK are now handled by private sector contractors. Business Post handles more than one in 20 letters posted in the UK.

Business Post said it had managed to minimize the disruption caused by the Royal Mail strike at the end of June.

The company said when it announced its full year results in May that it had more than doubled revenues of its UK Mail operation in the year to March 31 2007 to GBP 90.3m, following the full opening of the letters market to competition at the start of last year.

In May, the company said its operating profit from UK Mail also doubled from GBP 3.2m to GBP 6.4m after investing a further GBP 4m to increase sorting capacity.

The group’s turnover was GBP 325.6m in the year to March 31, compared with GBP 278.2m the previous year, and profit before tax was GBP 9.8m compared with GBP 4.7m the previous year.

Tuesday’s statement contained no information on the company’s expected profits or dividends.

Business Post now has more than 400 customers, including Prudential, which the company won in June, the BBC and the Department for Work and Pensions.

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