Postal Director General Georg Pölzl expects this year to be an exceptional year for the postal sector. “We had the AK elections, the EU elections, and soon there will be National Council and two state elections. Because there are more and more absentee ticket voters, we also benefit from this.”
The trend of letter volume shrinking by around five percent annually will therefore probably have less impact this year. Fundamentally, however, the former core activity has deteriorated sharply. “When I started at the post office in 2009, we had more than 1.1 billion letters, now it is half,” said Pölzl in an interview with the “Krone”, which hands over the chairman of the management to fellow board member Walter Oblin from the end of September after 15 years.
However, the parcel sector has quadrupled during this period. “We have grown from 50 million to over 200 million shipments per year, and that will continue. Fortunately, we more than tripled the capacity of the distribution centers early on, to now 138,000 packages per hour. Otherwise we would have gone off course during Corona.”
An additional challenge is that 80 percent of parcel shipments come to us from abroad. After Ireland, Austria has the largest influx in Europe, “this is due to the large, same-lingual neighboring country Germany. Five percent of the packages with strong growth come directly from China.” New is the ‘Alles Post Deutschland’ service, where you can have your package delivered via Germany to senders who do not deliver in Austria.
Overall, the postal sector has changed completely: in 2009 the parcel and logistics sector accounted for 13 percent of the group turnover, most recently this was 51 percent for the first time and soon this will be 60 percent, Pölzl calculates. Conversely, letters and advertising now account for less than 40 percent instead of 76 percent. The international expansion to Southeastern Europe and especially Turkey has contributed to this. The local daughter Aras Kargo then went to Azerbaijan.
To remain the clear market leader in Austria, self-service stations are being expanded (“we want to have one every 700 meters in metropolitan areas within a ‘sleeping distance'”), as well as innovations such as direct delivery to self-service stations. service boxes or to the waiting room, even if you are not at home.
The postal boss expects that the second growth area will be bank99. “This will be a very important source of income. In Italy, France and Portugal, banks contribute more than 50 percent to postal profits.”
The first position is very profitable anyway. Last year, with a turnover of 2.7 billion euros, they earned 392 million euros operationally. In addition to the shareholders around the state holding company Öbag (which owns 52.8 percent), who have earned well since the IPO in 2006, the employees also benefit. Last year they each received 813 euros as a success bonus.
Source: Krone
I’m Ben Stock, a journalist and author at Today Times Live. I specialize in economic news and have been working in the news industry for over five years. My experience spans from local journalism to international business reporting. In my career I’ve had the opportunity to interview some of the world’s leading economists and financial experts, giving me an insight into global trends that is unique among journalists.
