[extropy-chat] A nonZen story (was: A Zen Garden) [postal privatization tag]

[Terry W. Colvin]

Post offices

Pulling the envelope
Jan 20th 2005
 From The Economist print edition


Technology and competition are putting huge pressure on the world's postal systems

TO GET a sense of the future of postal systems around the world, look no further
than a bottle of milk. Last year, TNT Mail, the packet-delivery unit of TPG, the
Netherlands' national post office, began using a dairy company to carry packages
to people's doorsteps. At a time when the milkman already seems a vestige of a
bygone era—and the postman is struggling to avoid the same fate—this might seem
an unlikely alliance. But what makes the arrangement particularly revealing is
that it is not happening in the Dutch hinterland, but in Britain, where TPG and
the lactose-logistics specialists, Express Dairies, are vying to compete against
Royal Mail.

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Websites
The Postal Directive and reports by WIK-Consult are available on the European
Commission’s website. See also TNT Mail, TPG Post, Royal Mail, UPS, Fedex,
Business Post Group, Deutsche Post, La Poste and the Universal Postal Union.


This is just one symptom of how the post is changing. Few industries are as
inherently global (mail goes to every corner of the planet), yet at the same
time as tightly national (operators are still mainly state-run monopolies).
Michael Critelli, boss of Pitney Bowes, a mail-equipment maker, says, “The big,
all-in-one model works well if you believe that all the mail is about is
standardised delivery of a standardised product and high volumes” with no
innovation or customisation. But the market is not like that. Pressured by new
technologies and by emerging competition, what were once seamless operations
that made it meaningful to talk of a postal sector have increasingly fractured
into separate activities—parcels, letters, freight, specialised logistics and so on.

Established operators in rich countries are responding by trying to reshape
their businesses. It is not easy. Some operators have long relied on
cross-subsidies from activities such as banking to help cover other costs,
particularly those of delivering letters six days a week under the aegis of a
so-called universal service obligation—a national duty to collect and deliver
mail for a uniform price no matter where it is posted. Others with strong
monopolies have transferred profits from their protected letters franchises to
battle in the more competitive parcels business. Now these complicated economic
ties are being broken, sometimes by regulators, but also by competitors, which
have been growing ever bolder about challenging post offices' monopoly rights.
The accepted goal of most big postal systems is that the letter post should be
financially self-sufficient. Increasingly, however, the postal service is being
run as a profit-seeking business in which each activity must be economic in its
own right.

The postal service that most people come into contact with is only a tiny
fraction of the mail, package and freight-delivery operations upon which
economies depend. More than 80% of letter mail is from businesses, not
individuals (see chart). Of that, over half is monthly bills and statements.
(These are slowly moving away from the physical post towards customers' online
accounts, which explains the roughly 2% annual drop in mail volumes since 2000
in many countries.) One-quarter of letter volume is junk mail which, alas, is
growing.

Meanwhile, parcels and express delivery services have become more important:
e-commerce could not function without them. Globalisation has placed greater
emphasis on logistics and freight delivery, as companies manage complex supply
chains. In short, although what happens at the high-street post office is
important, it will be developments in the less visible areas of business mail
and other deliveries that will ultimately shape tomorrow's postal systems. “Ten
years from now, my bet is that the ‘post' as a word will disappear,” says
Isabelle Segni, a specialist in postal reform at the World Bank.

That prospect represents a challenge for governments and postal managers alike.
The traditional postal operators play an important role in developed economies,
representing roughly 1% of the labour force and about 1% of gross domestic
product. Where the market is open to some sort of competition, the
postal-services sector indirectly plays an even greater role in the economy
because business customers tend to make more use of innovative services such as
speciality printing, targeted direct mail, or pre-paid return labels for
mail-order goods. National postal systems globally account for over $250 billion
in revenue and employ 5m people, 1m fewer than in the early 1990s. In some
countries, the post is also one of the biggest financial institutions: Japan's,
for instance, is the world's biggest financial institution, with around $3.4
trillion in assets.

Postal operators everywhere are facing the same challenges, but they are
responding differently and at different speeds. Essentially they are caught in a
pincer movement. From below, new technologies are altering long-established
industry standards. From above, market liberalisation is opening the way for new
competitors who are free of the expensive infrastructure that shackles the
incumbents.

Getting it sorted

Among the more important technological changes are advances in automated sorting
equipment. Today's state-of-the-art machines can read most addresses and then
place the mail in the precise order for the letter carrier to deliver
door-to-door. Electronic barcodes on the mail allow operators to
“track-and-trace” each item, to provide service guarantees of when the mail was
sorted and delivered. As this type of cost-saving equipment has become
available, new firms have entered postal markets. Andrew Beh of ING Financial
Markets estimates that some competitors can operate at half the cost of national
posts. New technology improves their work processes, and they also benefit
because they lack the strong trade-union culture of incumbents. These are among
the reasons why Britain's privately run Business Post Group has been able to
compete effectively against Royal Mail.

But perhaps the biggest technological change has been the arrival of “electronic
substitution”. This refers to the shift of what was once sent by physical mail
to other media. For instance, bulky financial prospectuses can now be posted on
the internet (and downloaded and printed at the reader's expense) rather than
sent by mail. Postal operators have long been used to fat profits from
deliveries of monthly bills, statements, mail-order catalogues and so on. These
have begun a gradual shift towards delivery by internet. And although direct
marketing and e-commerce fulfilment with parcels is on the rise, it does not
compensate for the drop in letter volume because, to the dismay of national
operators, these are the two categories that are generally open to competition
in places where the market is partially liberalised. The result is that in the
very area where post offices might be able to recoup lost letter
revenues—namely, parcel delivery—they face the stiffest competition.

Alongside new technologies, postal operators must deal with political pressure
to reduce financial losses and accept market liberalisation. In America, which
accounts for almost half of the world's letter volume and over a quarter of its
postal revenue, the post is constrained from engaging in non-core activities
such as banking. Aggressive logistics companies such as UPS and Fedex have
become powerful competitors in express mail, parcels and freight delivery.
Indeed, the rise to global prominence of such firms is the clearest evidence of
the struggle facing big operators. “We have to make money delivering the mail,”
says Jack Potter, Postmaster General, who began his postal career as a mail clerk.

That is demanding wrenching changes, as the US Postal Service, which was in
crisis before Mr Potter took the top job in 2001, tries to modernise its
operations. With some success Mr Potter has overseen swingeing cost cuts and has
lobbied to reduce the postal system's pension burden. He argues that it helps
that the system is focused only on post, but accepts that without modernisation
the government-run system risks becoming irrelevant. Political oversight is
onerous: a presidential commission in 2003 called for ongoing change, including
more market liberalisation.

In Japan, Junichiro Koizumi has made reforming the national postal operator a
major policy goal. Last year, the prime minister unveiled a plan to privatise
the post, starting in 2007 by splitting today's monolith into four distinct
units: delivery, post-office branches, savings and insurance. But the government
has also proposed meddling with elements of the universal service obligation.
That brought opprobrium: the post office itself described the idea of reducing
service in rural areas as “degrading”.

Some of the biggest changes have been happening in Europe. By the end of this
decade, if all goes as planned, there will be more than one postal operator per
country, at least in the big four markets—France, Britain, the Netherlands and
Germany—that account for around 70% of all mail volume in the European Union and
80% of all parcels. The national post, long the daily face of the state, will no
longer be run by the government and may well be partially owned by another
company or have publicly traded shares (as is already the case in the
Netherlands and Germany). There will be fewer post offices, though many of the
things that they offer will probably be available at alternative outlets, such
as supermarkets and petrol stations. And the much-vaunted six-day mail delivery
may well be reduced to five days a week.

These changes are not happening without a fight. The Postal Directive, issued by
the European Commission in 1997 and updated in 2002, laid out a (non-binding)
timetable for the full liberalisation of the EU's postal market. Most EU
countries have modified their laws and changed the status of the national post
from a government department to a corporate entity. But few have treated postal
liberalisation as a priority. Nearly all have established national postal
regulatory agencies, as required by the directive, but the independence of these
is sometimes in doubt.

The French exception

Big countries, notably France, have fought doggedly against the commission's
efforts to speed up market opening. In 2003, after bitter wrangling, the legally
permissible postal monopoly in the EU on letters dropped from 350 grams to 100
grams, which opened up 11% of the letters business in the EU to competition. In
2006, the monopoly on weight is set to drop again, to 50 grams, opening up a
further 7% of mail. However, roughly three-quarters of letters weigh less than
50 grams, which explains why incumbents have shed only a small share of the
overall letters market.

Under the timetable set by the directive, in 2007 the EU's member countries will
discuss opening their markets completely by 2009. Norway, not an EU member,
plans to open its market in 2007; Sweden, Finland and Estonia already are open.
But few believe that many others will be, or will want to be, ready. Of the
countries undergoing liberalisation, only Germany, Britain and the Netherlands
have agreed to open their markets fully before 2009.

France stands somewhat apart. La Poste says it will meet the directive's
recommended 2009 date. However, analysts think it is more likely that La Poste
will try to keep its domestic stranglehold for as long as it can, meanwhile
entering markets abroad, as France's other utilities have done in the water and
electricity sectors. The company rejects this criticism.

In fact, with the exception of Britain's Royal Mail, which has been preoccupied
with domestic restructuring to reverse huge losses, Europe's big postal
operators have responded to the threat of market liberalisation by seeking to
expand into new businesses and new markets. Between 1998 and June 2004, they
have acquired or franchised more than 120 companies, in activities as diverse as
mail preparation, express-delivery, freight forwarding and intra-city
unaddressed mail delivery. In some instances, the logic has been to take on
greater volumes, thereby extracting better value from the sunk costs represented
by existing infrastructure, such as staff, sorting equipment and delivery vehicles.

Empires of the mail

The Dutch and Germans have been both the most aggressive and the most global in
their strategies. In the Netherlands, TPG acquired the express operator TNT in
1996, and expanded into freight delivery and contract logistics in Europe and
Asia. In Germany, Deutsche Post embarked on the most grandiose acquisition
drive, purchasing DHL, an express firm, between 1998 and 2002, among numerous
other assets, mostly in Europe but also in Asia. Since postal reform began in
1990, the portion of Deutsche Post's earnings made overseas has risen from 2% to
50%.

Both companies were relatively early in their efforts to restructure their core
businesses. TPG began in 1993; Deutsche Post in 1991, when it needed to
integrate the postal systems inherited from formerly communist East Germany.
Both operators have also floated on the stock exchange, which gave them shares
that they could use as currency for their acquisitions.

By contrast, France's La Poste says it seeks to be a key European player, but
not a global one, although it has acquired some companies and formed an alliance
with FedEx, America's second-largest logistics firm after UPS. UPS is thought to
want to enter the European market for bulk business mail, taking on the national
post offices—but only after the letters market has been further opened to
competition. La Poste, along with TPG and Deutsche Post, is considering buying a
minority stake in Belgium's La Poste when shares are offered for sale; TPG and
Deutsche Post are already vying to acquire a stake in Post Danmark when the
Danish government sells 25% later this year.

The shape of domestic deregulation differs in each of the four countries, and
has been an area of controversy. Germany has a tariff structure that discourages
competitors from consolidating mail volumes (this is currently being challenged
before competition authorities). The Netherlands allows companies to place
pre-sorted mail into TPG's network and also allows, but does not mandate,
discounts for large-volume customers. Britain retains the Royal Mail's monopoly
on the last-mile delivery for daily mail volumes under 4,000 items (Express
Dairies got its delivery licence because its volume is above the monopoly
threshold). Alternatively, rivals may hand over mail to the national operator
for final delivery, akin to the last-mile connection that gives new entrants
access to existing telecoms infrastructure. France has not yet specified the
rules for market deregulation; indeed, just this week the legislature began what
will be a lengthy debate on the shape of new laws, which prompted postal workers
to go on strike.

Small wonder that there have been complaints that these domestic responses
amount to anti-competitive behaviour. There have been some clear infractions.
Deutsche Post, for example, was fined by the European Commission in 2001 for
abusing its monopoly by allowing its global parcels business to receive big
subsidies from its letters franchise. It was forced to ring-fence its parcels
business.

There is also a view that the large number of acquisitions made by the big
operators has, ironically, caused the postal sector to become more than ever
dominated by states. A report prepared for the commission last year by
WIK-Consult, a consultancy, warned that there is some risk “of
‘governmentalising’ the private sector instead of privatising the public sector.”

In combination, these changes are challenging the post's identity and legacy in
ways that are only just starting to become apparent. One problem is managing
labour relations, for with modernisation comes big job losses. In countries that
have undergone reform and liberalisation, such as Sweden, as much as 25% of
postal jobs have disappeared. Ten years after its post became a corporation in
1987, New Zealand's system had reduced its staff by 40%, but the employees
handled 20% more business. Moreover, the price of a letter remained constant in
nominal terms, representing a big price reduction in real terms.

Checks on the post

Also controversial are branch closures. Even before deregulatory reforms were
begun, between 1998 and 2002 post-office branches were closed at an average rate
of about 2.4% per year across Europe. Historically, branches have acted as the
central nervous system of many communities, used to receive social security and
pensions, tax forms and the like. People fight to keep their local outlets.

What is clear is that postal operators will have to continue to expand into new
services. Some posts have offered certified e-mail using encryption techniques
to time-stamp electronic communications, though with little success to date.
This might get a boost now that there are plans for the Universal Postal Union,
an international treaty organisation more than a century old that co-ordinates
global postal activities, to manage a specialised internet address extension,
.post. Most posts are looking at expanding direct-mail operations and selling
“hybrid mail”, whereby large mailers such as financial institutions or utilities
merely provide data to the post, which takes responsibility for printing the
documents and delivering them.

Some plans are more radical. This month, Britain's Royal Mail said it would
start to sell telephone services to compete with BT, more than two decades after
the post and telecoms were split in preparation for privatisation of the latter.
America's postal service is forging new programmes such as allowing customers to
book a time for a parcel delivery or pick-up and providing customers with
delivery guarantees even for regular first-class mail.

Whether such efforts will succeed remains to be seen. As competition increases
so will pressure on incumbent operators to become even leaner and fitter. As
broadband internet and mobile phones become ever more ubiquitous, as electronic
substitution grows and as demand increases for flexible deliveries and
differential pricing, the justification for maintaining the universal service
obligation and the monopoly that accompanies it will diminish, and it will come
to be seen as an expensive anachronism. But, like other changes in the industry,
and with so much employment, national prestige and other interests at stake,
this may happen by slow coach rather than post haste. Politics, if nothing else,
will probably see to that.

*****
Mike Lorrey wrote:

> --- Amara Graps <amara at amara.com> wrote:
> 
>> In some sense since January 17, I experienced a collusion of the worst 
>> parts of United States Postal Service, Poste Italiane, CNR (Italian 
>> research) science funding, and more ... well you decide.
> 
> 
> Don't feel alone. The company I work for has consistently been dealing with
> 3rd world levels of service with our regular USPS shipments. Overnight
> packages everywhere taking 3-8 days to arrive. On time arrivals being the
> exception rather than the rule. I have on my desk an express envelope of
> paychecks which the post office never scanned into the system until they
> showed up at my local post office (the package was coming from our HQ in
> florida) and the package appeared as if someone had used it as a cushion for
> a week.
> 
> We've had packages disappear entirely, show up way late and damaged, or 
> merely so late that the time-sensitive legal documents we ship lost relevancy
> and we had to restart the process. I have never been more in favor of the
> total privatization of the postal service as I am now.
> 
> Mike Lorrey Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH "Necessity is
> the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of
> tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." -William Pitt (1759-1806) Blog:
> http://intlib.blogspot.com
> 
> 
>  __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business -
> Try our new resources site! http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/ 
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-- 
"Only a zit on the wart on the heinie of progress." Copyright 1992, Frank Rice


Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1 at m... >
Alternate: < fortean1 at m... >
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