Tag: UK

Business Post – Pre-Close Period Trading Update

Posted by | Oct 4, 2007 | |

Business Post Group plc today issues the following pre-close period trading update for the six months ended 30 September 2007.

Group revenues for the first half of the financial year increased by 9% on the equivalent period last year. As previously announced, the Parcels contract with Federal Express terminated on 30 April 2007. Excluding the revenues from this contract, the underlying revenue increase was 15%.

Excluding revenues from FedEx, parcel revenues are in line with last year. Good growth in the B2B market has been offset by a decline in B2C. As we have previously indicated, the B2C parcels market is becoming increasingly competitive, which is impacting Parcels margin growth in the current year.

Our mail business, UK Mail, continues to achieve strong growth with revenues in the period up by some 60% on last year. We continue to win a significant number of substantial contracts.

Revenues in Specialist Services are broadly in line with last year.

Interim results for the six months ended 30 September 2007 will be announced on 14 November 2007.

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Business Post extends share of UK postal market

Posted by | Oct 4, 2007 | |

Guy Buswell, chief executive of Business Post, the private parcel and mail delivery group, said the postal strike beginning on Thursday could endanger the future of the mail industry if the dispute was not resolved soon.

During the strike, he said, the 6m to 8m pieces of mail which Business Post’s UK Mail subsidiary collects every night would continue to be delivered into Royal Mail depots and wait there for final delivery once the postmen and women were back at work.

Mr Buswell also said the group’s parcels business had seen a sudden slump in deliveries to consumers in the days following the Northern Rock crisis. He said there had been “a huge reduction in volumes” of parcel deliveries from companies which sell electronic goods, such as computers, over the internet.

He said the business had picked up again since, but that it showed that consumer confidence could be hit by such events.

In a trading update covering the group’s half year to the end of September, the group said the UK Mail business “continues to achieve strong growth with revenues in the period up by some 60 per cent.” The mail market in the UK was fully opened to competition in 2006 and UK Mail now has a 7½ per cent market share.

Group revenues in the half year were affected by the loss of a contract with Federal Express. That contract, worth GBP 20m a year in revenues and GBP 2m in operating profits, ended on April 30 after FedEx acquired a UK parcels business.

Mr Buswell said that the group was having success in winning new contracts, however, the loss of the FedEx contract meant that group revenues had increased in the first half by 9 per cent rather than an underlying 15 per cent.

Revenues from the group’s parcels operation were in-line with the same period of last year, as “good growth” in the business-to-business parcels operation had been offset by a decline in deliveries to consumers.

The group’s shares, which have fallen from around 480p in recent weeks ahead of the postal strike, slipped another 6p to 394p in morning trading.

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Postcomm welcomes appointment of Ulf Dahlsten as commissioner

Posted by | Oct 4, 2007 | |

The Secretary of State for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform has confirmed the appointment of Ulf Dahlsten as a commissioner at Postcomm for a three year term with effect from 1 January 2008.

Ulf Dahlsten replaces Simone Bos who stood down as a Commissioner on 30 September 2007 at the end of her term of appointment.

For the past three years Ulf Dahlsten has been a director DG INFSO at the European Commission in Brussels. Earlier in his career he served as chief executive of Sweden Post as well as Chairman of the holding company of TNT Express Worldwide at a time when the market in Sweden was being fully opened to competition. He has also first-hand experience of the deregulations of the railways, taxi and telecom markets in Sweden.

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The Association of Pallet Networks

Posted by | Oct 4, 2007 | |

In the UK, the pallet service providers will be represented by their own dedicated industry body–the Association of Pallet Networks (APN, www.eyefortransport.com).

Formed at the end of last year, the APN has attracted membership from eight pallet networks in the UK: Palletforce, Palletways, Pall-Ex, Fortec, Palletline, United Pallet Network, Palletrack and The Pallet Network.

Together, these members represent more than 620 haulers, 24,000 vehicles and 11 million square feet of warehouse space.

The APN aims to raise awareness of the pallet network sector and to represent the interests of its members in the transport sector with media and government.

It provides a platform for discussion, analysis and the promotion of the pallet network sector to customers, prospective customers, network members and the public sector.

The APN has appointed logistics consultants to set up a detailed study of the sector, using on-line benchmarking to collect and collate information across the sector.

One of the first commercial tasks of the new body was to represent its members on the Countdown Forum for the 2012 Olympic Games, where it presented a detailed analysis of the advantages of using the pallet network approach to support the logistics of the Olympic Games.

Pallet networks are essentially co-operative organizations made up of groups of individual haulers who collect and deliver palletized freight in their own geographical area, consolidating loads destined for other parts of the country and Europe and trunking to a central hub for onward distribution. This significantly increases average vehicle fill, which, for pallet networks, is around 73%, compared with a national average of 51%.

Source: Newsdesk of www.eyefortransport.com

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