Shareowners of UPS elected a Board of Directors for a one-year term and ratified the appointment of Deloitte & Touche LLP as the company’s independent registered public accountants.
Ten directors stood for election to the Board of Directors and all were overwhelmingly elected. The appointment of Deloitte & Touche to serve as the company’s independent auditors for 2007 also was ratified.
Read MoreJim Hardenbrook hefted six boxes of records out of the back of his pickup, setting them on a hand cart in the parking lot of a doctors’ building on Spokane’s lower South Hill.
The 58-year-old wheeled the cart through the lobby and navigated to a room filled with records at the Northwest OB-GYN office.
“It’s Jumpin’ Jimmy,” one of the clinic employees exclaimed.
Hardenbrook is the founder and lone employee of Jumpin’ Jimmy’s, a fledgling delivery and courier outfit. Using the slogan “You call, we jump!,” Hardenbrook makes runs for food and office supplies for a handful of Spokane medical and accounting offices, and he shuttles records between clinics.
While the advent of fax machines was supposed to make couriers obsolete two decades ago, courier companies have adapted, said Bob DeCaprio, executive director of the Messenger Courier Association of the Americas. Fax and e-mail technology has affected single-document delivery, but couriers are branching out into transporting large freight, machine parts, pharmaceuticals, medical test results and human organs, he said.
Hardenbrook may be one of the newest additions to the region’s courier industry, but he’s not alone. He received one of 16 new business licenses granted to couriers by the city of Spokane in the last two years, according to city documents.
Read MoreDHL was founded back in 1969 by Messrs Dalsey, Hillblom and Lynn of the US; thirty years later, it became part of the Deutsche Post World Net group with a world turnover of around Euro 60bil. DHL’s express delivery and logistics services are available in 220 countries. In Argentina, it has invested USD 40mil and has been run by Norberto Lovaglio for the last six years (the executive was also made regional vice-president for Hispano-America earlier this year).
Locally, DHL has extended its international courier system and has begun working with local domestic post. Over the last five years, DHL’s Argentinian operations have expanded 101%: starting off in the year 2000, it had a 27% market share and it now has 50% of the market. The firm can be expected to try to buy up other operations soon but it does not, according to Lovaglio, plan to bid for Correo Argentina if the latter’s reprivatisation is called.
When the elderly postmistress in the Kent village of Sutton Valence decided to sell up in 1986, Gary Coyle was probably not on her list of target buyers.
Having left a tough comprehensive school in Northampton at the age of 15 without any qualifications, he became a chef and began an extraordinary journey. It took him from the Queen Eleanor hotel in Northampton to a head chef at the Mark Warner company, cooking at the exclusive ski resorts of Verbier and Meribel.
But after catering, he became attracted to the mail business when the village post office went up for sale near to the home of his in-laws. That was more than 20 years ago. He has never looked back, but many other postmasters have not found the going so easy.
As the only shop in the village, his business is thriving, but other rural post offices are not so lucky. About 2,500 are under threat of closure and Coyle is now leading a mission to save them.
He is aware that it will not be an easy task. The 14,200-strong post-office network loses about Pounds 4m a week and is propped up only by government subsidy.
Post offices that make money tend to be the larger ones in busy urban areas.
Coyle has tried a post-office initiative before, and failed – the Postmasternetwork that aimed to boost the average income of a sub-postmaster by Pounds 5,000 a year by finding new revenue streams. When he pulled the plug on the operation in January, he cleared all its debts, but lost Pounds 100,000 of his own cash in the process. That venture was backed by high-profile City figures, who prefer not to divulge their identities.
Coyle remains undeterred. He has now teamed up with Mail Boxes Etc, part of United Parcel Service (UPS), the international courier-services giant, in a plan to set up new post-office franchises under the Mail Boxes name.
Mail Boxes already has 105 post offices in the UK and Ireland but is desperate to expand. Coyle is leading the initiative on their behalf and being paid a retainer.
Read MoreDell has stopped relying on UPS, the world’s biggest package deliverer, to handle its box deliveries in the United States.
Instead, Dell is turning to UPS shipping rivals DHL and FedEx. The move cuts into Sandy Springs-based UPS’ dealings with one of its biggest customers. But it is a boost for DHL’s efforts to grow its presence in the U.S.
UPS spokesman Norman Black said Dell and UPS “were simply unable to reach an agreement for pricing for renewal of this particular contract.”
None of the companies involved would disclose the dollar value of the deals. Dell shipped 20.5 million personal computers for the U.S. market last year, according to IDC, which tracks data about the technology industry. That represented just over half Dell’s worldwide shipment of PCs.
But Dell’s market share has been slipping, and it has been looking for ways to streamline its operations and shave costs for everything from manufacturing to logistics.
UPS had been the carrier for virtually all of Dell’s U.S. package deliveries, Black said. While that ended effective April 1, UPS remains Dell’s primary package deliverer outside the U.S. and will continue to handle logistics issues for the computer maker, he said.
He declined to say where Dell had ranked among UPS’ largest clients. He said the reduction in business between the companies is not a material event from a regulatory financial accounting standpoint.
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