Postal chief sees freight returning to rail and sea (Australia)
The international freight industry will face increasing pressure to cut back on flights and revert to sea and rail deliveries because of environmental concerns, the head of Australia Post predicts.
Australia Post’s managing director, Graeme John, who will be chairman of an annual meeting this week in Queensland of nine of the world’s biggest postal groups, said the problem of global warming would have an increasing influence on the way the global postal industry is run.
Mr John said growth in international freight from consumer goods such as electronics had been managed on a “just in time” basis, with air travel preferred to other forms of transport because of its speed advantage. But that approach was no longer viable.
The postal groups meeting this week – Australia, the United States, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Spain, France and Britain – are members of the Kahala Post Group, a consortium created five years ago to help them compete with private freight companies.
Mr John instigated the consortium because he “wanted to do something about the dominance of the DHLs and the FedExs and UPSs in the international parcel network”, as did other former monopoly postal groups.
The Kahala group – named after a resort the members stayed at during their founding meeting in Hawaii – conceded they could not compete with the private companies on speed, so instead focused on reliability of delivery.
But to guarantee that reliability the Kahala members had to upgrade their tracking systems.
It also required the creation of a “delivery calculator” – a database of eight billion postcodes that allows a customer to walk into any postal outlet, list their destination and be told a precise window during which a parcel would be delivered.
While the private couriers already offered that certainty, and faster delivery, the Kahala members undercut their prices by 40 per cent to 50 per cent.
As well as pressure to shift towards less environmentally-damaging modes of transport, Mr John said a worsening economic environment could prompt a trend to slower “deferred” delivery services.
The Kahala partnership is also moving beyond postage, with Australia Post, China Post and the US Postal Service preparing to launch a group-owned money transfer service to compete against Western Union.
