Christian Salvesen – More growth and profits
Christian Salvesen – More growth and profits
Read MoreTag: Europe
Your identity, lying on the doorstep
Would-be identity thieves no longer need bother rifling through dirty rubbish sacks. A major credit reference agency is linked to a promotion that is encouraging householders to leave personal data, including their dates of birth, in unsealed plastic bags on their front doorsteps.
Take one of these bags – brightly coloured, for extra visibility – and you could find out the names of the people living at the house, their mobile and home phone numbers, their monthly credit card balances, their occupations and salary levels, the problems they may have in paying back loans, and even the birthdays of their children. These, and many other equally intimate subjects, are included in the latest Household Insight Survey, which is being distributed across the country. The survey comes with a letter to householders that tells them to ‘simply leave your completed survey in the bag provided on your doorstep’.
‘Any criminal with a little bit of intelligence could walk down the street during darkness and gain an unhealthy amount of information about a lot of people,’ says Michael Blakemore, whose own street in Durham was targeted for the promotion earlier this month. ‘This way of collecting data is seriously risking identity theft.’
The Household Insight Survey, a questionnaire that encourages the public to voluntarily divulge personal information for marketing purposes, is operated by a subsidiary of TNT Post, the Dutch-based postal operator. TNT Post in turn supplies the data to a number of companies, including the market research and credit reference agency Experian.
Read MoreRivals call for Royal Mail to slash charges
Royal Mail could be forced by the industry regulator to cut the price of delivering rivals’ letters for the ‘final mile’ a move it claims could be crippling.
At present, Royal Mail charges private competitors 13p a letter to deliver them in the final mile.
Typically, private companies collect mail from large business customers, sort it and take it to Royal Mail sorting offices nearest the postal address for delivery.
But TNT Post, Royal Mail’s biggest competitor, has appealed to Postcomm to force Royal Mail to cut its charges because it says they are so high that competitors are being ‘squeezed out of the market’.
Royal Mail, however, wants the regulator to allow a rise in the 13p charge, saying the fee is too low and preventing it from being able to compete effectively.
Postcomm will examine the rival claims and give a verdict in six months.
But it is already clear that the regulator does not believe that competition is harming Royal Mail and it believes the company is simply trying to protect its monopoly position.
Even though 2.5 billion business letters are being collected by its competitors, the regulator says that the 13p charge for delivering them more than covers Royal Mail’s costs.
Royal Mail says an adverse decision by the regulator could cripple its business, which has already been hit by the ‘loss’ of 2.5 billion business letters, one in eight, to private competition in the past 12 months.
Royal Mail is concerned that this haemorrhage will accelerate as the private postal companies cherry-pick its biggest business customers.
Earlier this month, Postcomm chairman Nigel Stapleton said: ‘Royal Mail is using an attack on the regulatory structure as a smokescreen for its own lack of progress in tackling high labour costs.
‘Since single daily delivery was introduced in 2004, every initiative that the company has taken to improve efficiency has been absorbed either by higher wage rates or increased pension costs.’
Read More2006 financial statements: Swiss Post aims for sustained growth
Swiss Post once again achieved good results in 2006. At 837 million francs, Group profit was 26 million francs up on the prior-year figure (811 million francs). All segments once again ended the year in positive territory. By adjusting its organizational structure, Swiss Post now intends to support its sustained growth and enhance its innovativeness. With this aim in mind, Swiss Post is to bundle its innovative and electronic new businesses in Switzerland and abroad in a new Group unit named “Business Customer Solutions” and managed by Frank Marthaler, currently Head of Strategic Customer Management. He will be appointed a member of Executive Management as of 1 July 2007. In addition, Head of the PostLogistics Group unit Michel Kunz will also take over the management of PostMail as of 1 December 2007. Josef Bösch, the current Head of PostMail, will retire on this date.
In financial year 2006, Swiss Post generated Group profit of 837 million francs, an increase of around 3.2 percent or 26 million francs on the prior-year figure (811 million francs). Operating income rose by around 5 percent year on year to 7,895 million francs (2005: 7,499 million francs). In addition to the acquisition of the GHP Group and MailSource Inc. in the USA, the main contributors to the growth in sales were the Financial Services (PostFinance) and International segments. Equity continued to increase, but despite reaching 1,605 million francs (2005: 922 million francs) remains out of line with the industry.
Read MoreRoyal Mail demands to charge rivals more
The battle between Royal Mail and one of its leading competitors in the UK letters market, TNT Post, intensified yesterday with each side making conflicting demands for changes to the way prices are controlled.
At the heart of the struggle is the issue of how much Royal Mail can charge competitors for delivering mail those competitors have collected. Royal Mail argues that it needs to be allowed to charge more to compete in the key business mail market. It says the existing price structure “simply isn’t working”.
TNT Post claims the state-owned company already charges too much and allowing Royal Mail to increase its wholesale price would squeeze out competition.
Under current rules Royal Mail has to allow outside access to its network, with its own postmen and women delivering letters collected by competitors. It is allowed to charge around 13p for each letter handled under the access agreements.
The access price is crucial for both sides in the battle for the business mail market, where a relatively small number of customers account for a high proportion of the UK’s mail. Rivals to Royal Mail that have entered the market since it opened up at the beginning of last year see the sector as their best chance of winning business. They can collect bulk mail from business customers, pre-sort it, and then use Royal Mail to take it the “final mile”, without having to set up their own delivery networks. The amount Royal Mail can charge for this service is key to competitive pricing.
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