Tag: Royal Mail

Royal Mail discounts business post

Posted by | Jan 5, 2007 | |

Royal Mail is to introduce new volume-based discount schemes for business mailers from 2 April. While it’s difficult to get excited about a stamp (franking mark or PPI), the new postal prices mean it’s time for businesses to review their mailing contracts again.

Personal mail, such as letters and birthday cards, make up only 10% of the mail delivered in the UK by Royal Mail. The rest is made up of business mailings to other businesses, and to consumers, and consumer post to businesses.
Postcomm Chairman Nigel Stapleton said, “Full competition is off to an encouraging start in 2006 with 18 new operators now in the market. Many large mailers, both in the private and public sector, have switched to new operators who they have found to be reliable and sensitive to their specific needs. Everybody has benefited because, in response to competition, Royal Mail has delivered record service levels.”

A Postcomm survey in October found that mail prices had reduced significantly for 20% of businesses as a result of the increased competition in the postal service.

“We are committed to offering discounts to customers who give us mail that can be sorted by our machines, rather than by hand. These items cost us less to handle so it’s right that we reflect this in the prices we charge those customers,” said Lorna Clarkson, Royal Mail’s Director of Commercial Policy and Pricing.

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Royal Mail rejig creates one of the UK's largest print tenders

Posted by | Jan 5, 2007 | |

Royal Mail Group has launched a tender for its entire print requirement, worth up to GBP400m after restructuring its print management division.
A new unit of about 25 staff, Royal Mail Document Management Services, went into operation on 1 January to handle the Post Office operator’s complete print output.
Royal Mail has also advertised a four-year print management contract worth up to GBP100m per year as part of a bid to streamline its current roster of 79 UK-based print suppliers.
The postal giant is planning that the contract, one of the biggest print tenders ever to reach the UK market, will be won by either a single company or a consortium of firms.
Print involved will include point-of-sale, posters, business documents, labels and internal publications, while other functions, such as finishing, storage, fulfilment, scanning and indexing, repro and digital archiving, are also involved.
Print management sources have suggested that only business process outsourcing giants Williams Lea or Astron would have the financial clout to take on such a large contract alone.
The tender was published in December and includes work for Royal Mail’s three UK operations: its letters business, the Post Office’s retail and financial services, and Parcelforce Worldwide.
Until the contract is set up in late spring or early summer, the new unit will handle all Royal Mail’s print production requirements itself.

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Why postal privatisation delivers

Posted by | Jan 4, 2007 | |

Who would have though that this time last year, it was predicted that Royal Mail would lose over £600m worth of business by 2008, as a result of the postal market opening to competition on January 1 2005.

The claim, which could almost have come out of Royal Mail chairman Allan Leighton’s very own spin-machine, was actually made in an independent study by Corporate Mailing Matters.

The research, in which 300 top UK business mailers were quizzed on how they expected volumes to shift after deregulation, claimed 17 per cent of the market would to move to alternative providers, with corporate mailers shifting swathes of business to force price reductions and service benefits.

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Privatisation is still best option for UK Post Offices

Posted by | Jan 4, 2007 | |

Queues at post offices apparently were longer than usual in the run-up to Christmas, as people sending different sizes of cards and gift parcels had to worry about the new rules on dimensions and weights of envelopes.
For many, this experience will not be repeated. One in six of the UK’s 14,300 post offices will be closed either this year or next. Add in about 4,000 that have already gone since Labour came to power a decade ago and a third of the network will have been cut in a dozen years. Commercial banks could only stand and admire this brutal approach.
Protecting and improving public services was top of Labour’s agenda. Post offices count as a public service to many people. but not perhaps in Whitehall’s definition.
If asked, most voters would oppose closures per se. Some might think differently if presented with the figures given to ministers by Royal Mail. It claims that only 4,000 offices are profitable and network losses will double to Pounds 200 million in this financial year. Such alarming figures are inevitably a matter of choice in any integrated business, or the NHS. Internal accounting is flexible because overheads can be allocated wherever management wants. Under EU rules, the state ought not to subsidise competitive mail or parcels services. It can still fund post offices that were, until recently, used heavily as outlets for state business.

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Increased benefits for UK business mail customers from 2007 postage prices

Posted by | Jan 2, 2007 | |

Two new products and enhancements to existing services, aimed at business customers and large volume mailers, will be introduced on 2 April 2007, Royal Mail announced today. These are part of the changes to postage prices that will come into effect next year in line with the four-year price control set by postal regulator Postcomm in March 2006.

One of the new products is Automated Standard Tariff Large Letter. This offers business customers sending a minimum of 250 large letter-sized items that can be machine sorted discounts of between six to nine per cent.

Another new product – Cleanmail Advance – will offer easier access to discounts for customers sending more than 1,000 items with correct and machine readable addresses.
Royal Mail is also introducing enhanced volume-related discounts for some of its Mailsort business mail services. These include more volume-related thresholds that attract a discount, and a lowering of the minimum threshold, to enable a larger number of smaller mailers to qualify for a discount.

Prices will continue to decrease for heavier weight items, which will support the growth of the online retail market.

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