Pitney Bowes Inc, has said its first-quarter profit and revenue rose, fueled by improved demand for its mail and postage services, particularly from small businesses.
Pitney Bowes, whose meters are a mainstay in corporate offices, said net income rose to USD126.6 million, or 54 cents a share, from USD113.6 million, or 48 cents a share, a year earlier.
Read MoreThe USPS is ending its sponsorship of celebrated cyclist Lance Armstrong, winner of five consecutive Tour de France races.
The agency has sponsored Armstrong’s pro cycling team for eight years and will continue to do so through the end of 2004. Spokesman Gerry McKiernan said the agency has decided to go “in another direction” with its advertising. Asked if that meant some other sport relationship, he said “it’s possible.”
Cycling is popular in Europe and postal officials had sponsored Armstrong’s team in an effort to increase their international business.
Read MoreUPS has reported an 11.3percent increase in revenue and a 24percent gain in net income for the first quarter, reflecting strong results in all three business segments. Scott Davis, UPS’s chief financial officer, pointed to three highlights for the quarter including an increase in average U.S. ground and air volume of nearly 600,000 packages a day, or 5percent; a doubling of international profit to USD269 million, and double-digit revenue growth in the UPS Supply Chain Solutions unit.
Read MoreIBM have announced that its consulting division, Business Consulting Services, has been awarded a contract by International Post Corporation (IPC) to help them transform and manage UNEX, an Internet-based quality measurement system for the international postal organisation. The new measurement system will allow postal operators to be more responsive and react quickly to deteriorating delivery times, and facilitates the speedy settling of accounts between the countries’ postal operators. IBM and IPC aim to have the system fully operational by 2005. In order to achieve this, more than a half-million test letters will be sent between 36 countries every year.
Read MoreA new threshold for machine read barcodes on flat-size mail will be crossed on July 31. That’s the date the United States Postal Service begins to require a 90 percent rate of readability of barcodes in order to qualify for lower rates. This read rate, increased from the current 80 percent-is evaluated by the Postal Service’s MERLIN (Mailing Evaluation and Readability Lookup Instrument) system. Letter- sized mailing rates remain at 90 percent, the threshold set when MERLIN was deployed in 2001.
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