Tag: Royal Mail

Royal Mail will this week announce that it is on course to reach its profit target of GBP400m for the current financial year, having generated profits of about GBP200m in the six months ending September 30. Last year, Royal Mail made an operating profit of GBP220m, compared with a GBP197m loss in the 2002-03 financial year. The turnround has been achieved through cost-cutting, including 30,000 redundancies, as well as a rise in the price of stamps. If the GBP400m profit figure is reached for the 12 months ending March 31 2005, the state-owned company has promised to pay out GBP200m in bonuses to its employees.

Royal Mail will this week unveil profits of more than pounds 200m for the first half of the year – and will attempt to allay fears that the profits have been bought at the cost of a deteriorating service. The results, which put the Royal Mail on track to make profits of more than pounds 400m for the full year and pay a pounds 200m dividend to employees, are an extraordinary turnaround from 2002, when the company was losing pounds 1m a day. Last year, it broke even in the first half. Mail delivery performance figures for the second quarter will show that Royal Mail is meeting its target of 98.5 per cent of second class letters delivered within three working days. More than 92 per cent of first class letters are delivered the next day, against a target of 92.5 per cent.
The figures will be a boost to the credibility of Adam Crozier, the chief executive of Royal Mail, who took direct responsibility for the operational side of the business earlier this year after it missed all 15 performance targets for last year.

Local authorities can expect cheaper and better-targeted distribution of their printed comms material following a deal struck with Royal Mail. Royal Mail has agreed to extend the periods for which councils can book it to distribute their materials to two years. It has also allocated distribution according to council boundaries rather than by postcodes, said LG Communications secretary and treasurer Kevin Wilson. The deal was struck between PROs from councils including Staffordshire, West Sussex and Surrey, and Royal Mail national sales manager Tim Cable, in Milton Keynes last week.

Postage stamp prices must go up to ease Royal Mail’s financial problems, Adam Crozier, chief executive of the state-owned group, said yesterday. Royal Mail had returned to profit after several years of heavy losses but still lacked investment and had an old-fashioned pricing structure, he said. “None of our prices are aligned with our costs.” Business customers paid more to subsidise domestic stamp prices. Royal Mail was also pressing for the introduction of size-based, rather than weight-based, pricing of mail to better reflect the costs of sorting and delivery.